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.

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.

Got Device Drivers?

I have been wanting to upgrade to Windows Vista 64 from (Vista 32) bit for quite some time now, but just haven’t found the time to do it, until now. The Christmas Holidays are upon us and come Friday evening, I decided to take the jump.

I backed up any crucial data to my raft of external hard drives and threw the Vista 64 DVD in to the PC. I planned to format C:\ and install the OS there. Since I have my programs stored there, I would be required to reinstall those too. Vista x64 doesn’t run 16bit code at all, so my existing 16bit programs would have to run on XP via Virtual PC 2007. Virtualization ftw!

The OS installed fine and actually felt a lot smoother than x32. Browsing was much noticeably faster and scrolling through CoverFlow on iTunes was extremely fast and smooth, rather than sluggish. Things were going along perfectly – until I switched on my five external hard drives. They all powered up and worked perfectly but then two of them, both Western Digital MyBook’s (connected via Firewire) would randomly switch off and the only way to get them to power back up was to reboot Vista. It was like there was a power saving feature in effect, but I’d already disabled that. Then my three other external hard disks began behaving erratically. Sometimes I could access them, and on other occasions I couldn’t, which made Explorer lock up horribly bringing the entire OS down – something that I couldn’t even manage to do in Vista x32.

My last issue was not with Vista, but with Canon. I have two Canon printers, and didn’t even check their website for 64bit drivers before deciding to move to x64. They are so good with driver releases that I naturally expected them to have them already out. They weren’t…. Given that Vista x64 has been out for the same length of time as x32 I had been hoping that driver manufacturers had got their act together with regards to releasing 32 and 64bit drivers however it is just too slow.

I did some reading up on various forums and quite a lot of users have got no problem with x64, which is good news. However it still remains that Vista x64 needs more pace on the device driver front. If Canon don’t release 64bit drivers then I’ve got no choice but to avoid their printers in future – something that I won’t enjoy as I’ve always used Canon printers.

Other than the two issues I have, Vista x64 was really good. I noticed some speed improvements and smoother Aero interface use. However when I can’t use my printers in the OS, the whole point of upgrading from x32 becomes irrelevant. I will wait for Service Pack 1, due in early 2008 before trying out the OS again but I seriously hope Canon get some x64 drivers out because that is what the OS really needs – better 64bit device drivers and fast.

Does it impress?

I’ve been writing about this for a while now, just collecting and scribbling down my experiences with this new operating system from Microsoft. It’s such a big system with so many drastic changes under the hood that at this early stage, it can have teething problems. Read my first two months experience Here.

Also a quick heads up, PR has updated his blog with a blinding review of the Toshiba M400 TalbotPC!

I’m free! Since it’s release on the 30th January I’ve been tinkering around with Windows Vista and generally being driven mad by it’s quirks. On the upside I’ve found this operating system rather refreshing to use over stale XP. I’ve also been taking down notes on my experiences and have written an article on what Windows XP users can expect when they make the transition to this bloatastic OS.

Now that this write up is out of the way, and my system is semi stable, I can finally get back to writing games reviews, which I’m well behind on right now.

So far I have…

• Moved this blog to a new host
• Rebuilt my PC in to a wee overclocked beastie
• Installed WordPress 2.1 & K2
• Installed Windows Vista Home Premium
• Got myself one of those girlfriend things (not the inflatable type)
• Cried as Lotus Organiser 6.1 wouldn’t work (does now)

To say I’ve been busy is an understatement. Given the circumstances I think I’ve managed to juggle events in my career and my social life rather well! Winter over here in the UK isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. I had been expecting a ton of snow to drop between Jan and March 2007, so far we’ve seen one full night of snow, which saw the UK grind to a halt as about a foot of snow hit London alone. Man, when I was a child the snow was so deep that they’d be waist height to me, and things were fine. Obviously the UK wasn’t as crowded back then, but you get what I mean. Right now as I type this, it’s sunny out there with a chilly ice cold wind. Even my father’s flowers have started blooming – they’re confused too!

I’ve had a few emails asking if I’ve ‘Died yet?’, so no I haven’t done so. I’ve just been rather busy that’s all. I’m currently doing a small (well it was meant to be) write up on Windows Vista’s key features that newbie’s can expect to encounter. Now I was meant to finish it this weekend but half of it has been cleverly left at work! Lastly, I met the lovely Deena at my local gym two weeks ago and we’ve been dating since then Valentine’s is coming up people…get those Tesco’s cards on standby…

More Power!

I’ll possibly be away for a few days while I do a total rebuild on this PC, which is an ancient beastie. To be honest I don’t need to build a new rig, but given that Windows Vista arrives towards the end of January, I do want my machine to handle this bloated behemoth of an Operating System (OS). I’d roughly guess that about 90% of PC users who want this OS will end up doing a rebuild of their machine.

It’s slightly absurd that an OS should require so much resource power just to bloody run, but that’s just typical Microsoft. I’m going to stick to XP for as long as I can though, because I’ll be buggered if I’m paying £220 for the Home Premium Edition, I’ll wait for a price drop. I’m not too clear on the upgrade version yet as the info is a bit clouded. So this Friday 5th, my new PC parts will arrive along with XP Media Center 2005. Hopefully everything should go well, because I’ve got a heap of reviews needing checking.

This new rig will be mainly built for non gaming use, as I have the Xbox 360 for games now. So I’ll be doing video encoding, general office use, blogging/php work, photo editing and multimedia on this new rig for the most part. One half of me doesn’t want to spend the best part of £750 on new parts, given that this machine still does and can easily do anything that I normally throw at it. Hell XP flies on this. However it struggled with the Windows Vista Beta, although it was a beta. See ya soon!

So I’ll be moving from:

Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ (running overclocked at 2.4ghz)
1.5GB of DDR3200 Ram
3x160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hard drives
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
Nvidia 6800GT (running dual 19" Widescreens)
Geforce 2MX PCI (running one 20.1" Widescreen)

To:

Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard (its got blue leds!)
Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4ghz (will be overclocked)
2GB of DDR2 PC6400 Ram (further 1gb to be added later)
1x160GB Hitachi Deskstar (got enough external storage as it is)
Creative Audigy 2 Sound (I’ll stick with this for now)
Gainward Geforce 7900GT (to drive my dual 19" screens)

Anyway, Jake over at http://spikex.net/blog/ has a small but informative preview on Beta build 5308 of Vista. It’s a good read!