uneasy about upgrade to 9.04

[HollywoodJumper]

I love Ubuntu and use it as my main OS , however i dual boot windows vista on another partition of my laptop. I currently have Ubuntu 8.04.1. I haven't visited the forums in a long time and am a little scared to upgrade to 9.04 because i have seen a lot of problems posted on the forums. If i do upgrade to 9.04 i have the following questions.

1) do i need to back up either windows or 8.04 files on my partitions?
2) will i still maintain my ability to dual boot?
3) what is the benefit of upgrading to 9.04?


Any insight would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

[CyberCam]

It's been a while since I too have posted anything on the forums, but here's to doing my part.

1. You don't NEED to backup Windows (I didn't), BUT it's always a good idea anyways, just in case your HDD goes belly up!

2.Yes, you will be able to still dual boot. I have have done a clean install on both my laptop (HP Pavilion zd8000, ATi Mobile X600.) & desktop (2 times) (AMD 3 core with ATi HD 4870 vid card) as well. There's no ATi driver support for the older ATi cards (my laptop included) but the open source drivers work great for me I don't do any dual monitor or gaming on my laptop, plus I have WindowsXP MC on it anyways (I rarely use it LOL!).

3. The bigest benefit that I can honestly see, is the improved performance (speed), it uses less resources, and also the upgrade to ext4 is a nice touch (I know I'd have to do it sooner or later).

To Note:
I had no troubles installing it on my laptop. However, I did have graphics issues installing it on my desktop, the video wouldn't work on the Live CD or when I initially installed it, but I had to reinstall using the F4 function button & selecting the "low resolution" option for it to work (found that somewhere in the forums).

Overall it's great but my laptop seems to run it better than my desktop for some reason. Adobe Flash is still freezing up on my desktop but not on my laptop.. that's the only issue I seem to have so far. It seems that the older your hardware is, the less likely you'll have issues.

I'm going to be testing it out further myself before upgrading any of my clients or wife & kid's desktops, maybe I'll just wait until 9.10 to do that!

[Mark Phelps]

Strongly suggest you use the LiveCD to try out the upgrade first.

I have a tablet PC running an older version and almost NOTHING worked anymore running the 9.04 LiveCD. Was easily able to fix some of the problems, but others remained unfixable.