Careful What You Update!

I was chatting with a customer yesterday about a topic that I haven't seen come up for a while, so I thought it worth a quick mention on the Blog.

Do you use your recording computer mostly just for recording, or is it also your home computer or otherwise used for email/browsing or gaming etc? The reason I ask is that most people who keep a 100% dedicated-to-music computer tend to know instinctively that if you have a rock solid system that runs like a dream you should avoid diving into computer OS updates. If the computer you use is more multi-purpose, you may be more inclined to let your OS update itself to get whatever latest and greatest features are on offer. A word to the warning..

It doesn't seem as bad as it was a decade or two ago. If you were on a Mac and you updated your OS from say 10.8.1 to 10.8.2 there was a good chance that your DAW might stop working properly, or that your Waves plugins stopped working until they issued a patch that was compatible. This often tended to be true on the minor updates as well as entirely new OS releases.

Oddly, it wasn't nearly as bad on the Windows side of things. The last time I remember any Windows update breaking anything audio related was going from Windows XP service pack 2 to service pack 3 (2001). That really messed things up for a while. I think there may have been something comparable moving from Windows 7 to Windows 7.1 but I'm not entirely sure about that.

So just as a word of warning, if your system works really well, make sure you check compatibility with all the manufacturers of the software you use before pushing the button to update. If you do make the jump early, make sure that you've backed up literally everything including a boot disk clone where possible.

Stay safe out there!