Upgrading GirlFriend 

I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if GirlFriend is run in background mode and its sound is turned off. However, for the life of me I can't find the switch that turns the sound off. So, I just run them separately, and they work just fine. [GirlFriend 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 shut down for while.I very cautiously upgraded to GirlFriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also 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 written in some obscure language I can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality.

Also, I've never liked how the GirlFriend Series is totally "object-oriented." A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't 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 can't 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 often prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, even with new Plug-Ins. On top of that, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0, although he did not ask for it. This has an automatic pop-up feature he can't control, and it's impossible to modulate its sound.I suggested that he consider installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling any of the Wife series, Wife will delete all MSMoney files and crash the system before uninstalling itself. With a purged cache, Mistress 1.0 will never install.

The moral of this story is: Know your system's hardware requirements, software peculiarities and limited range of compatibilities.and do be careful with those alluring upgrades.