I haven't done this "upgrade" yet.

Question answered! It was kind of a silly one since I now notice 20 zillion topics on the issue.

It's not the true upgrade they are talking about, it's the latest Release Candidate which is used to iron out bugs they have missed. If you don't want to use it it's entirely your choice. If your not sure, just use the normal client viewer.

It would be good to mention exactly what upgrade you mean.

If you keep your install files then you can generally try out new versions and go back to the old version if you don't like the new version.

If you mean the Release Candidate version, RCs are test versions, not "stable, ready for prime time" versions. You can have both an RC version and the normal viewer installed at the same time and use whichever you feel like at the moment.

The new release candidate has a lot of changes from the preceding versions in both cosmetic and functional aspects. Some folks might want to try it out in order to be able to offer their input on the changes before they are completely cast in stone. Others would prefer to just use their old familiar version as long as possible and deal with the new version when it becomes mandatory.

Unfortunately every viewer (RC or otherwise) has bugs and different things that will work fine in one but not the other.

If there's nothing that really annoys you about the one you're currently using, stick with it.
If there's a bug that really drives you crazy, try the RC and see if it's been fixed (and what else has been broken) and then pick which viewer's bugs annoy you the least.

Understood! Thanks for the replies. I'm still new (a week). I will stick with what works for now

Today i'm going to try and join the forum cartel.

It would be good to know which upgrade is in question, and from which older release. It's actually still possible to run the 1.18.mumble versions with a little hackery, so even one of those may be the "from" situation.

Upgrading to the 1.19.1 current standard release gives WindLight rendering--possibly a problem for less powerful graphics cards (but worth knowing if you need to be budgeting for a newer graphics card, or starting the process of tweaking graphics preferences to fit a lesser card--Torley intends a video tutorial to help with that process, forthwith.)

Upgrading to the older 1.19.0 release (if you're on a hacked 1.18 or a 3rd-party viewer) will introduce some stability problems and annoyances that were fixed in 1.19.1.

Upgrading to the 1.20 Release Candidate is for the brave-of-heart, no matter from what release your upgrading. Lots of threads about that here, and blog comments, and Linden Office Hour rants, etc. But, if you can live with the problems, it's very worth trying it out to see where *you* encounter problems, and voting for jiras that will fix them. (I attended Benjamin's office hour yesterday, and somehow a lot of positive feedback has gotten generated for the Dazzle graphics in 1.20 and its First Look predecessors. So, unless the negative response to misfeatures is overwhelming in the jira, the Lindens honestly believe they're introducing an improvement. So... where that's wrong, it's incumbent on the user base to disabuse them of those misconceptions. They're not being stubborn, necessarily--they're just getting mixed messages.)

The problem is that they're very receptive to positive feedback, but not terribly receptive to any feedback that isn't fanatically positive which includes constructive criticism.

Some office hours (Torley's are a good example) are frequented by people who'd cheer if LL changed the TOS to demand their first-born child. The crowd there will tear you to shreds if you don't sing praises.

Other office hours are so obscure that they only attract people who have a like-minded view (Everett's office hour yesterday was about integrating social networking into SL and sharing RL/SL information with SL/non-SL friends which I doubt would have drawn as much unamious positive feedback from the general population).

I should clarify that Benjamin's office hour yesterday was far from a fan club--although comparatively civil. But through other channels, they've gotten this positive feedback, which as you say carries a lot of reinforcement compared to anything critical. And, really, that's kind of understandable, given that the "signal-to-noise ratio" of criticism is pretty low: folks will b!tch about most anything LL does; it takes a lot of informed and rationally presented feedback to be taken more seriously than the usual carping about anything new and different.

Given the nature of some first-born children this is hardly surprising.