I am currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and I have been
having some problems lately. I have been running the same version of
DrinkingBuddies 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the
Girlfriend releases I have tried have always conflicted with it.
I hear that DrinkingBuddies will not crash if Girlfriend is run in
background mode and the sound is turned off. But I am embarrassed to say
I cannot find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them
separately, and it works okay. Girlfriend 1.0 also seems to have a problem
co-existing with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some
sort of timing incompatibility.
I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I
might see better performance from Girlfriend 2.0. After months of
conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had
experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said I probably didn’t have enough
cache to run Girlfriend 2.0, and eventually it would require a Token
Ring to run properly.
He was right - as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.
Shortly after that, I installed Girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were
supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus
anyway. I had to clean out my whole system and shutdown for a while.
I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI
probe first and installed a virus protection program. It worked
okay for a while until I discovered that Girlfriend 1.0 was still in my
system. I tried running Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still
installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has a feature I didn’t know about that
automatically senses the presence of any other version of Girlfriend
and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate
removal of both versions.
The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some
problems. Like all versions of Girlfriend, it is in some obscure
language that I cannot understand much less reprogram. Frankly, I think
there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the
desired functionality. In addition, to get the best connections with your
hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I have never
liked how Girlfriend was very “object-oriented.”
A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of Girlfriend to
Girlfriend Plus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of
Girlfriend. He discovered that Girlfriend Plus 1.0 expires within a year
if you do not upgrade to Fiancée 1.0.
So he did, but soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he
describes as a huge resource hog. It has taken up all his space, so he
cannot load anything else. One of the primary reasons he decided to go
with Wife 1.0 was because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus.
Well, it turns out the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes
prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins he
wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well
warmed-up system before he can do anything. Although he did not ask for
it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw, which has an automatic pop-up
feature he cannot turn off.
I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he heard if you
try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete
MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0
will not install anyway because of insufficient resources.