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tech support request - silly but funny

andy_k

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Tech Support Request.
Er... yes, well... All very sad, really...




Subject: Tech Support Request
Date: Wed, 1 April 1998 17:01:07 +0000
From: [email protected]
To:[email protected]




Desperately seeking technical support...

I'm currently running the latest version of girlfriend and having some problems. I've been running the same version of Drinking Buddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, an all the Girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it.

I hear that Drinking Buddies won't crash if you run Girlfriend in background mode with the sound switched off. But I'm embarrassed to say I can't find the switch to turn it off.

I just run them separately, and it works fine.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with my Golf program, often trying to abort my Golf program with some sort of timing incompatibility. I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with Girlfriend 2.0.

After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said that I probably didn't have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and that it would eventually require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right - as 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. I had to clean out my entire system and shut down for a while.

I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed virus protection. It worked OK for a while, until I discovered that Girlfriend 1.0 was still in my system! I tried to run Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has a feature that I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of Girlfriend 1.0 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 that I can't understand, much less re-program.

Frankly, I think that there is too much attention paid to the look and feel and not enough to the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold plated contacts. And I've never liked how Girlfriend 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. He discovered that GirlfriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. So he did, but soon after that, you have 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 that he upgraded to Wife 1.0 was that it came bundled with FreeSexPlus 1.0, but it turns out that the resource allocation of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug and Play items 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. And although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0 which has an automatic pop-up feature that he can't turn off.

I told him to install Mistress 1.0, but he said that he heard that if you try to run Mistress without first deinstalling Wife, Wife 1.0 will first delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress won't reinstall due to insufficient resources.

Anybody out there able to offer any technical advice?
 
Andy, an excellent analysis of a series of recurrent problems!

Not exactly technical advice, but in the hope that some of the younger members might avoid my mistakes, here goes.

A word of warning for those of you young enough to learn -

Many years ago I decided to stick with my install of Wife 1.0, without realising that I had contracted for an automatic upgrade to Wife&Kids 2.0

There I was plugging and playing, without any true appreciation of the potential consequenes.

You must read the small print! Most of us will just press "Accept" when the terms and conditions come up on screen, without checking them, or realising what we have let ourselves in for.

When it all went wrong, I complained to my service provider, who said that while termination of the plug/play service was an option that she would consider, it would not remove my obligation to accept the automatic upgrade, and that I would I would remain responsible for the new increased monthly payments.

I wonder what car I'd be driving now if I hadn't fallen into the trap?
 
brilliant !! My brother has experience with Divorce 3.0. This unfortunatley reduces all rescorces to the extent that any of the Girlfriend versions are unavailable to him. Any advice?
 
By a bizarre coincidence I actually had the original one of this that was doing the rounds a year or two back on my laptop but erased it while clearing off old files a couple of days ago, I'll see if I can dig it out off another PC as it seems to have been updated a bit

Cheers
Andy
 
I tried a couple of evaluation programs of Girlfriend 1.0a and was suitably impressed to stick with it. I now have Girlfriend 3.0 but found that each upgrade is not neccessarlily a true upgrade. Girlfriend 1.0 was OK but lacked some functionality. Girlfriend 2.0 fixed some of these problems but stopped responding frequently.

I have run Girlfriend 3.0 now for several years, after a few months I kept getting annoying popups prompting me to upgrade to Wife 1.0, somehow I managed to stop these but now it is back and I can't remember how to stop it.

One way would be to upgrade to Girlfriend 4.0 but I would like to try before I buy and am worried that I really need to uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first. But what if there are incompatability problems? Could I rollback to version 3.0 easily?

Perhaps I could download a patch to fix Girlfriend 3.0 and add some features of Girlfriend 2.0 that were lost in the upgrade. I came across my version of Girlfriend 1.0 a few years ago and it still looked good but some of the functions were a bit basic.

I have to say the packaging for Girlfriend 4.0 looks brilliant, these marketing guys certainly do their work well. It's a shame you can't get a bespoke version custom made to your requirements. I guess it's possible to do some tweaking but it would be expensive. I dont think they will ever release a version of Girlfriend that you could be 100% happy with as there would no longer be the need to upgrade. (Crafty b@ggers!)

Has anybody's version of Girlfriend suffered from virus vulnerability? What are the signs to look out for? I know somebody who is looking for Boyfriend 2.0 or 2.5 but I have no idea where you get hold of that or even if it is available.

Be careful when upgrading, not all versions are compatible with your hardware. It is not worth changing to a newer version that does not have backward compatiblity with your hardware and you cant use all the features.

I would like to find out a bit more about Girlfriend 4.0. Does anybody know if they have fixed the volume control? Can you use plug-ins and what addons are available? Is there likely to be a Girlfriend 5.0 in the pipeline and should I wait? Do I have to install Girlfriend 4.0 before v5.0?
 
Seems like a good thread to tell you I have just paid my £180 for Divorce 1.0. I'll let you know what's like once I get it.
 
Originally posted by GrahamC230K
Seems like a good thread to tell you I have just paid my £180 for Divorce 1.0. I'll let you know what's like once I get it.

Hmm, well my legal fees topped £3.5k 2 yrs ago, as for maintenance .........:crazy:
 
The best part of 20 years ago I managed to run Girlfriend 1.0
AND Girlfriend 2.0 seperately for about 6 weeks or so.
(I recall both versions were supplied with floppies.)
As stated by others, cache problems soon arose.

The solution was EndItAll, a very handy utility.
 
Go for the ultimate highs and lows in life.

Try Au-pair v6.9

followed by Mother & Mother-in-Law v8.8
 

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