http://nomoregoatsoup.wordpress.com/...y-development/

Enabling features found in the XP drivers for Vista, which Creative refuses to do, is in no way stealing. It's product improvement that Creative does not have to pay for, keeping customers happy for them. They are a bunch of ass-clowns. My next soundcard purchase will not be Creative.

Forum where many are expressing their anger towards Creative. http://forums.creative.com/creativel...cending&page=1

Creative is a company with a seriously disreputable past anyway. This newest episode is more or less par for the course for them. I'm just surprised they haven't locked that discussion in their forums.

Locking that thread would only lead to threads created elsewhere, somewhere with alot more traffic, for users to express their displeasure. In addition, it would be even more of a PR headache considering the brow-beating they are already taking from charging for Alchemy drivers for Audigy series cards when the X-Fi versions are free.

SOURCE: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article...8/03/29/046201

Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."



i think it's done right now for Creative labs.
They try to take any penny out of you and promise things they don't want to give you with the hope you buy the latest and newest Soundcard from them.

Creative doesn't get a penny any more from me and lot of others.


LOOK at the Forum from Creative:

65 hours later more than 1600 reply's from angry customers.

http://forums.creative.com/creativel...cending&page=1

**Creative thread from Audio forum merged with existing one**

I read through most of this yesterday and I will say this much. It isn't all that uncommon as you think to call hardware outdated. However I think the audigy sound cards should get the respective drivers needed for vista. They decided that telling customers to get the X-FI would work but this isn't a software company trying to get people to subscribe this is just a stupid driver needed. They should of paid the other person some compensation to the work that got done on the modified driver to allow use with Vista. It was altered yes they accepted donations yes this may have been wrong but a simpler solution was at hand rather than to threaten a law suit. I know I will personally start using another name brand as well as many others. Windows 7 is fixing to head down this same path as well I think charging a subscription fee rather than just selling an OS to customers too I seen this won't go well but those that don't understand will get had on the newer OS yet to come. I barely get the X-FI drivers to work properly in my Vista OS as well.

There is something seriously out of whack with that. Also, 3dfx (God rest their souls) never took action against modded drivers etc, so I don't see the logic in it personally. I mean, surely modded (read = better) drivers being available helps to sell products.

I haven't had anything Creative since and old SB Live! Value soundcard, and a webcam with the drivers from Hell.

Those of you that need the driver(s) or the whole ISO instal for safe keeping I did find a site linking to get that. I am getting it now for safe keeping.

http://digiex.net/drivers/164-creati...-daniel_k.html

Here are the modded X-Fi drivers for anyone who needs them.

http://files.filefront.com/SBXF+VTDR.../fileinfo.html

Well, from what I understand Creative is mad because the features were intentionally crippled for Vista so they could force users to buy new cards from a company they are liscensing their sound processor for the X-Fi to.

I guess profit margins were down, considering they are selling their HQ.

BTW, the Audigy drivers have since been reallowed by Creative, but the X-Fi still are not.

Thanks

Yes more less this glad to see the audigy get support again.

Ah, thanks. And the Audigy drivers being reallowed is something, at least.

Considering that Creative haven't really been doing much work in hardware since the sound blaster Live! ... I suspect they've got exactly what they deserve.

As far as I can tell, they expand their card lineup approx every 18months .. which vaguely coincides with moore law, which suggests the timeline for chips top shrink/get faster.
The Xifi's most likely aren't much different to the SBLive! except that they've clocked the chip higher (due to smaller die size & lower energy use) and can hence crunch more numbers in the same timeframe ... (24b/192Khz audio anyone?).

To tell the honest truth, I suspect that the hardware division has been dismantled & outsourced, and no-one knows how the damn chips work anymore. To top it off, the original programmers have probably pee'd off for a better pay rate somewhere else .. leaving Creative in the lurch, as no-one knows anything about either the hardware, nor the software.

That said .. Sound Blaster Sound Cards are premium after market cards, the average Joe makes do with whatever's on board, so they've quite frankly pissed off the enthusiast community, and aren't going to be forgiven.

Oh, and Creative's MP3 players, and Speaker Sets quite frankly suck.

So much for putting eggs in many baskets.
Creatives going down like a 90yr old woman with a broken hip

I also had to contend with the Creative issues with Vista. My Xi-Fi Fatal1ty card would not be recognized, searched everywhere for fixes for the darn thing, then, out of the blue - Creative offered a 'fix' for the driver. Of course it had to come through Dell. Wot a sur-prize!
So, for now all things cook right along and life is good...

People will just need to move their sites overseas and release thru torrents or othe rp2p network after this bs. It won't really stop anything in the long term.

I'm downloading the drivers now (via torrent) .. for my parents & anyone I've ever advised to use Creative Sound Cards in the past .....