Darren/Kain Archive at Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Author Archive for Darren/KainPage 2 of 22

Creative Vs Daniel_K

Published

on April 2, 2008

. 1 Comment

Silence from Creative after customer revolt

Picture the following scenario. Imagine if you had gone out and purchased a Creative Labs Soundblaster of some kind, there’s loads of them around but the most popular ones would be their Audigy and XFI series cards. Now imagine smiling when you saw that ‘Vista Compatible’ logo on the box, meaning that the card would work on Microsoft Vista. So you purchase it, take it home and install it into your PC. You would then either:

Install the drivers from the included CD
OR simply get and install the latest drivers from the Creative website

You would now have a fully working card right? You should be able to use all its capabilities given that it is ‘Vista Compatible’. What would you do if you found out that it wasn’t really ‘Vista Compatible’ ? This is what thousands of creative soundcard owners have been asking themselves for years now. Creative’s soundcard drivers have always been laughably poor, even back when I used them on my Audigy 2 in Windows XP, but it turns out that their new XFI drivers are just as bad. There are no decent working drivers in Vista at present I am led to believe. Because the Creative ‘Soundblaster’ moniker is such a powerful one - your average joe public just assumes that the product adds high quality sound to your PC, and will then go out and purchase one without knowing all this.

A driver modder known as Daniel_K decided to come up with his own modified drivers that restored functionality to these cards - everyone was happy, well except for Creative. One would think that they’d embrace his skills and maybe hire him, but instead they decided to do him for copyright issues! Daniel_K was warned on the Creative forums to cease activity, and what then followed was a backlash that I have never seen before. The forums were filled with thousands of unhappy gamers/soundblaster owners ranting and mocking Creative for ignorance. For a corporate company as big as Creative, they should be able to afford driver engineers to develop the best drivers possible but no. Instead they just rehash and rebox card after card to make even more money - and it works.

Since Windows Vista arrived on the scene, driver vendors have struggled to come up with decent functionality with their drivers as they have to work with new API’s they aren’t used to. As I have stated in the past, Creative were one of those companies that ended up admitting that their Audigy 2 and XFI drivers were poor in the first place. Nebula Electronics who made the once extremely popular Nebula TV Tuners have all but gone silent on customers with regards to their Vista drivers since the release of the operating system in 2007. Despite it having the best TV software around, I have stopped using mine, and so has PR because they are just incomplete and flaky in Vista for well over a year now. Even their forums have dried up with no Nebula feedback.

Back to Creative though. I am a huge admirer of them and their products, well mainly their portable music and peripherals rather than their soundcards, which I have stated have always been top notch build and spec wise, but useless driver wise. They started the whole thing off, they brought music to the very early PC’s, just simple beeps from a soundchip embedded on a bit of PCB back in early 1987. It all went pear shaped as they branched out and kept rehashing soundcards to keep a foothold on the market. However the tide has changed, and they are suffering.

Built in sound capabilities on PC motherboards have already reached the point where they require little system resources and sound superb. Other soundcard manufacturers have been rising over the past year and are building far superior products. Auzentech, Asus, Razer to name a few, and they all work fine in Vista. There is no doubt that Creative are about to feel a backlash that they’re not used to. Lately they have failed to deliver a good sucessor to the Creative Zen Vision:M - their once flagship audio player. They have now seemingly focused on developing peripherals for the Apple iPod - their very own competitors. If this wasn’t enough to be concerned about, I would also be concerned about this, not that it means much to the company as a whole.

Yesterday, Creative via one of their forum moderators stated that they have listened to the feedback (feedback? you sure?) and decided to work with Daniel_K in supporting their driver development programme. Is this a case of way too little, too late? To be truthful, I hope he tells them to shove it. I truly respect, and admire what you’ve done Mr.K. I gave up on Creative cards a long time ago and have never had an XFI so I have no idea how bad it’s drivers were, but poor Creative drivers was why I went out and bought an Auzentech Meridian, a truly awesome bit of kit. Good luck with Creative.

You can read Daniel_K’s full story Here.
Full Creative/Daniel_K story Here.

Bloomin Summertime :(

Published

Darren/Kain

on March 30, 2008

in Rants

. 4 Comments

Clocks go back 1 Hour

1 Hour less sleep…what tart came up with this idea then eh? I already get 4 Hours of sleep time and now that’s going to be cut short! Ta! I suppose the lovely ladies roaming our town centres in short skirts and low cut tops are a positive factor in all this.

I mean, look! It’s already 22:31 and that’s my bedtime! Bring the darkness back for the love of god! This is not typical British weather…

Wordpress 2.5 lands

Published

Darren/Kain

on March 30, 2008

in Links and Site Stuff

. 8 Comments

It’s that time of the month again

Wordpress 2.5 arrived rather quietly overnight last night so it’s time to look into upgrading this blog again. For those who aren’t clued up on how big a upgrade this is take a look-see at the Screencast and the screenshots of the new dashboard interface.

A list of 2.5 compatibile plugins can be found Here. So next weekend I shall attempt to upgrade this blog, with possibly disastrous results. I may need to move to the latest K2 build at the same time I predict. Hoorah!

Hehehehehe…Rawr!

Published

Darren/Kain

on March 22, 2008

in Links and WTF?

. 3 Comments

Awwww, they’re so cute! Must order more!

Surviving

Published

Darren/Kain

on March 16, 2008

in Life

. 3 Comments

It’s been quite a while since I mentioned what I’ve been up to, mainly because it’s been general stuff that hardly differs from day to day. It’s just dull boring things to be honest, which mainly consists of getting up early for work, surviving the dull day and then coming home completely knackered and passing out on the bed. Hardly the most captivating thing to write about at all really.

Since the new year I’ve gone back an old love of mine - weight training and generally keeping fit, which also involves me being a pain in the arse to everyone around me because I can’t help but be concerned about friends when they’re gorging on big macs or a softe bloody kebab after a night out. Dishing out advice is beginning to become a bad habit. I’ve been working out intensely and have made good gains with the sad result that I now need bigger clothes! Good for me, bad for my wallet.

In other news my plan to slowly give up console gaming is working, although with Condemned 2 and Grand Theft Auto: IV around the corner I have no idea how long that will last. On the whole I am gaming less, and as a result I have more time for other stuff - neat! That is one thing I said I’d do in 2008.

Interplay return!

Published

Darren/Kain

on March 12, 2008

in Links

. 8 Comments

It’s been a long time coming!

Welcome back! http://interplay.com says it all. The awesome Californian outfit, responsible for some of the best old school games during the 90’s have returned. Amongst their massive titles was of course the Star Trek games - Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites.

Another classic title, was their Descent series - regarded by many as having some of the best AI code, even by todays standards. Descent is what I really remember about Interplay, and why I first fell in love with their development style. Then came the incredible MDK, and Earthworm Jim to name another batch of top selling titles. Even bigger than all this was the late 90’s title Fallout, a title set in a future post-apocalptic world. Even bigger than every sodding game above was the colossal Freepsace series. Yum yum!

Welcome back! (again!) I now worship your glowy logo and website.

Bad Vista!

Published

Darren/Kain

on March 3, 2008

in Babble

. 5 Comments

Being hit by the ‘Wake up call bug’…

Lately Vista x32 has been acting like the bitch queen from hell on my PC, there is just no reasoning with it at all because it does what it wants regardless of your needs. When the OS (Operating System) works it is a dream to use but when it doesn’t it becomes rather irritating. To the point where I’m actually thinking about the damn thing even though I’m at the dinner table with my girlfriend - in a resteraunt. She’s thinking about future things and I’m thinking about how to get more speed out of the OS…

Over the weekend I decided to reinstall Vista in preparation for Service Pack 1 due later this month. At the same time I decided to dedicate a hard disk to XP and dual boot between the two OS’s, mainly so I could play older games, which don’t like Vista. Upon installing XP, the setup utility would crash after it had pre-loaded some XP bits on to my system, this was rather puzzling. I performed a full chkdsk /f which took a solid 2hrs, much to my annoyance.

Hours later the setup utility was still crashing. All I wanted to do was format the hard disk XP would reside on! So I tried vista’s setup with the same result. Then I remembered that vista, for some unknown reason has lately been seeing my DVD drive as a SCSI device. This doesn’t harm the functionality of the drive inside vista, but it seems the OS setup’s utilities don’t like it. It turns out that there’s a few SATA sockets on my mobo, which are RAID dedicated and Vista does not like this….arse. So I removed the DVD drive SATA cable and shoved it into one occupied by one of my many internal hard drives. Viola! The drive was now recognised as an ATA device and XP installed flawlessly, as did Vista x32. However, I was in for a shock.

XP was the shock. A dated 7yr old OS, which required 134 updates after SP2 was installed. The non-bloated bastard brother of Vista decided to knock me sideways by loading up in around 7 seconds on a WD Raptor 10,000rpm hard disk. By comparison I could return from a visit to the loo and Vista would only just be at it’s login screen firing up. In fact it was so fast that I actually questioned myself as to why I’m using Vista. Sure it looks great, but the whole Aero interface had worn thin after a few months of it’s release and I was coo’ing at the slim XP interface.

So why am I using it? DirectX10 is about as useful as acts in the UK to circumvent street crime. Vista may be smoother and quicker than XP in most areas but lately it’s been feeling heavily bloated, even though I have trimmed the number of active services down as much as possible.

I tried to watch some videos this weekend on Vista via Zoom Player, except it was a stutterfest for some reason. It wasn’t the video, it was wmpnetwk.exe (windows media player network sharing service) using up 70% of my CPU cycles to do something random, whilst Zoom Player chugged along with Danny Glover in Predator 2 sounding like he was underwater. What the hell was it doing? I observed this service over the course of the weekend and came to the conclusion that it’s a greedy bastard using a large amount of CPU time for what? It never did this before. I’m not currently sharing any media given that my Xbox 360 is dead, and I haven’t added any media folders for monitoring yet since I am on a new vista install.

Of course there is more to Vista than that, it’s heavily redesigned and updated to easily cope with future hardware and technology and do agree that it handles that very well. XP fares somewhat worse here, for example setting up XP to stream media to a 360 - a nightmare in itself requiring a heap of updates. Anyway, I’m still questioning the need for Vista right now. XP may be an old aging OS, but on a 4GB 3.7GHz dual core system it really flies

We’re talking Bugatti Veyron vs an F1 Grand Prix car, and you can decide which is which.

Earthquake!

Published

Darren/Kain

on February 27, 2008

in Babble and Life

. 5 Comments

<–Cloverfield Monster!? YA RLY

I’ve gone and done it again. The moment something bloody exciting happens, yours truly sleeps right through it without a wink. Last time it was Buncefield, and now an Earthquake that measured a colossal 5.2 on the Richter scale last night at around 01:00 GMT. I crashed out on my bed at around 22:30 because I was so tired, and then woke up at 05:00 only to see the BBC News readers on TV going crazy about something that had happened in Lincolnshire, North East England. Then up popped a map with a bullseye on the ‘danger’ zone and immediately my thoughts were "Oh noes! Bomb!". Bomb indeed…

So I resumed my early morning duties of checking a few forums, as well as blogs. One of these forums was Overclockers UK, where I’ve hung around for a fair number of years now. Sure enough there was a bigarse thread there about the quake. Even funnier was the picture just below of many users all rushing to the forum to find out what had happened.

Its hilarious when you think about it - if a bomb or major accident etc happens the first thing half of us do is rush off to the interwebs! Balls to contacting loved ones to see if they’re OK, just post on forums instead! It’s amazing how reliant we are of the Internet now. At this point I thought I’d phone my lovely girlfriend who will have definitely been awoken by this event. Instead I got an earful of abuse for waking her up! Charming!

Valentines Day…

Published

Darren/Kain

on February 14, 2008

in Babble, Links and WTF?

. 13 Comments

It’s that time of the year again folks!

Time to give florists extra business. So break out those Tesco’s Valentines Cards, grab some flowers and show your loved one just how much they mean to you by printing out one of these gorgeously crafted cards.

So what have I gone and done? Well I’ve gone and bought a USB Moo Moo cow for Deena and I. "A what?" I hear you ask. Well it’s a bit hard to really describe properly. Check this YouTube vid to see how it works.

Moomoo is a USB-enabled cow that lives on your desk, and is somehow attached to software that lets it communicate with a second Moomoo cow. If you push a button on Moomoo, its companion (ideally located in close proximity to your special someone) will moo at them and start glowing.

Quiz Time!

Published

Darren/Kain

on February 6, 2008

in Babble

. 5 Comments

<—Spam, yum yum yum

Allo! No I haven’t died. I’ve just been rather busy both at home and at work. So to get myself back into blogging I have decided to reply to one of those utterly dumb spam emails that tend to occupy ones inbox. These normally get deleted on sight…so here goes.

1. Was 2007 a good year for you?
Yes. Got promoted twice at work, and have a great girlfriend with a fantastic ****. Aside from that things were ‘quiet’.

2. What was your best moment of the year?
Possibly going to Australia. It was a business trip but I had always wanted to go there. What little I did see of the place I really loved, and everyone loved my British accent! Aside from that it was my close friends Rene and Raj having a little baby sprog daughter.

3. What was your least favourite moment of the year?
Having to prepare to head off to Australia. I haven’t felt that nervous and uneasy in a long time as I hadn’t been on a plane in a long time. That was just one of my reasons anyway.

4. What are your plans for 2008?
Well on the work front, I’ll be heading into part time education come Sept 2008 to study Hydrodynamics. I’m quite excited, yet nervous because if this course is longer than two years - I am screwed. I hate the thought of returning to education, and I hate pesky teenagers even more. On another note I need to think about family matters….nuff said there.

5. What countries did you visit?
France, Italy, Australia, Venice and…Liverpool?

6. What date in 2007 will remain etched in your memory?
The 4th November - My birthday. At work it was prank after prank. I ended up going home unaware that I had a condom stapled to the bottom of my long coat….

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Completing a huge project at work after months of hard research and design. I have never worked long hours like that in my life.

8. What was your biggest failure?
Not fulfilling two of my New Yeas Resolutions - To get my own place, and to buy a car. Oops!

9. Did you suffer any illness or injury?
A killer cold after I returned from France in September. Had me knocked out for a solid week and a half. I never get colds and if I do, they’ll last about a day max.

10. What was the best thing you bought?
My 32" Samsung R87 HDTV. It’s lovely and has run flawlessly for hours upon end. /me scrambles for some wood…

11. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
My girlfriend Deena getting horribly drunk on a friends birthday. She then sang to me as we walked home, whilst other revellers looked on. She should hang her head in shame.

12. Where did most of your money go?
Mostly Clothes and Xbox 360 games, with HD-DVD’s following a close third. I went a bit nuts on spending in 2007.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Christmas Holidays. I had so many plans, but those two weeks went by in a flash and before I knew it, it was time to return to work

14. What songs will always remind you of 2007?
Hmm, I listened to heaps of tracks this year! Killing Joke-The Death & Resurrection Show, a lot of the legend that is Richard Ashcroft - Live from London, and a lot of Lacuna Coil.

15. Compared to this time last year are you:

Fatter or thinner? ‘Tubbier’, because I never went to the gym in 2007 after getting my new position. That’s already changed over the past 3 weeks though!
Happier or sadder? Probably a bit sadder… I miss old friends.
Richer or poorer? Richer!

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Spent more time working out. I got slack in 2007 - never again.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Gaming on the Xbox 360. I played a lot of titles, so I’m quitting in 2008 to make up for lost time.

18. How will you be spending Christmas?
Christmas is always spent with my mother and father.

19. Which MySpace users did you meet for the first time?
None, Social Network sites are for stupid teenagers with no lives.

20. Did you fall in love in 2007?
With my Xbox yes, but in life er no as I was spoken for.

22. What was your favourite TV show?
Top Gear! "How hard can it be?"

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Hmm, nope.

24. What was/were the best books you read?
I surprisingly didn’t read much in 2007. The Gospel according to Chris Moyles was one of them, as was The Relic. I also bought the Mass Effect novel (Xbox 360 RPG), and On the Edge - By Richard Hammond but have yet to even read these two books.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Fray - I remember hearing some of their tracks before 2007 and thought they would be huge. Imagine my surprise when I found one of their videos on Xbox Live’s Marketplace, and then they became really well known after some successful tours.

26. What did you want and get?
A big, nice HDTV!

27. What did you want and not get?
A bigger, nicer HDTV!

28. What kept you sane?
Memories of special people in my life. They’re my strength.

29. Which celebrity did you fancy the most?
Ahhhww, Keeley Hazell

30. How mind numbingly boring was this quiz?
I want 40 minutes of my life back please.

Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Author Archive for Darren/KainPage 2 of 22

Creative Vs Daniel_K

Silence from Creative after customer revolt

Bloomin Summertime :(

Clocks go back 1 Hour

Wordpress 2.5 lands

It’s that time of the month again

Hehehehehe…Rawr!

Surviving

Interplay return!

It’s been a long time coming!

Bad Vista!

Being hit by the ‘Wake up call bug’…

Earthquake!

<–Cloverfield Monster!? YA RLY

Valentines Day…

It’s that time of the year again folks!

Quiz Time!

<—Spam, yum yum yum

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