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Creative Labs receives some serious community bashing


MikeyHunt

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Creative Labs receives some serious community bashing

Things are heating up over at the Creative forum where Creative Labs have issued a statement that forbids the user Daniel_K of providing X-FI sound card drivers for Windows Vista that fixed several issues and provided Vista users with the same functionality that Windows XP users were enjoying.

Daniel_K was also told to stop distributing drivers for sound cards that would enable features that were not intended for them. The community outcry is huge. The thread was started yesterday and it reached page 26 with most forum users vowing to never buy a Creative product again siding exclusively with Daniel_K.

I think the main point that is making it extremely frustrating for most users is the fact that one guy was able to fix driver issues while the Creative driver developer team failed. A smart move if you ask me would be to hire that guy right of the forum unless there is a reason why the development took that long.

The drivers are already spreading on various torrent websites and it seems that this is going to be a public relations nightmare for Creative.

courtesy of GHacks

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It's about time Creative got a slap in the face. Maybe they will shape up and start being a decent company again, but then again... they still seem to have little to no serious competition.

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I have had a Sound Blaster 16 PCI for quite a while now... it's decent, nothing to get excited about, so I can't say anything bad. (technically it wasn't made by Creative, but Ensoniq, so then I guess that explains that)

I was gonna build a Vista machine very soon, and was gonna go with an X-Fi... now I'm not sure what to do. Besides this "outrage", I have heard very bad things about Vista's audio support. But at the same time, I've had glitchy onboard before, and never want to go through something like that.

The only solution is to not use sound, I suppose.

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Glad I'd gotten this headsups after reading the news posts. I was saying to myself:

'Self! Would it be worth maybe upgrading to vista at some point?'

Being that I have mainly creative cards as well, I would have to use them. However, nothing gets to me more than having shoddy hardware support once knowing it's possible to get 'good' hardware support. It's like giving a baby cold milk even though the warm milk it wants is.. right... THERE in front of it but can't have because the warm milk is 'too good' for it.

Random note: the creative threads are 197 pages, will be 200 in a few mins. >.>

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Creative Labs receives some serious community bashing

I think the main point that is making it extremely frustrating for most users is the fact that one guy was able to fix driver issues while the Creative driver developer team failed. A smart move if you ask me would be to hire that guy right of the forum unless there is a reason why the development took that long.

courtesy of GHacks

I think this is where people are getting confused. Creative didn't want to develop new drivers, it's not that they aren't capable; they want you to buy a new card. It's a business strategy that is used everywhere, it's just the whiny little gamers and wanna be hackers/crackers that don't realize this. It's the same reason Microsoft stops supporting OS's. It's not because they have come up with something wonderful, they want you to spend your hard earned money so they somewhat force you to do it. Eventually everyone has to upgrade, your hardware might die and you find that nothing supports the old OS's anymore. It's really no different. I mean at least the card works, there's a lot of really expensive software out there that forces you to basically buy it again if you upgrade to Vista. They don't make patches or drivers, if you want and need the program and you upgrade to a new OS then you are forced to buy it again. Happens everyday in the real world. Why people think they are "owed" backwards compatibility and on going for life support is beyond me. If they aren't selling new sound cards how do you think they are going to pay the programmers that develop the support? Having a product that lasts forever is great for the consumer however if you are a business person you purposely design your products so you have some kind of "guaranteed" future.

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I think this is where people are getting confused. Creative didn't want to develop new drivers, it's not that they aren't capable; they want you to buy a new card. It's a business strategy that is used everywhere, it's just the whiny little gamers and wanna be hackers/crackers that don't realize this. It's the same reason Microsoft stops supporting OS's. It's not because they have come up with something wonderful, they want you to spend your hard earned money so they somewhat force you to do it. Eventually everyone has to upgrade, your hardware might die and you find that nothing supports the old OS's anymore. It's really no different. I mean at least the card works, there's a lot of really expensive software out there that forces you to basically buy it again if you upgrade to Vista. They don't make patches or drivers, if you want and need the program and you upgrade to a new OS then you are forced to buy it again. Happens everyday in the real world. Why people think they are "owed" backwards compatibility and on going for life support is beyond me. If they aren't selling new sound cards how do you think they are going to pay the programmers that develop the support? Having a product that lasts forever is great for the consumer however if you are a business person you purposely design your products so you have some kind of "guaranteed" future.

A couple problems with this logic:

1) Creative is still selling the Audigy series sound cards (the cards in question). THAT is why people expect support.

2) Microsoft has had XP out for 7 years. They still support and sell it even though Vista is out... development costs are over, and security patches don't cost nearly as much. They'd want you to buy Vista, but they don't mind if you buy and use XP because it's almost all profit now. Same would apply for hardware. The longer you make something, the less it costs to make it.

3) You don't see Microsoft shutting down MSFN forums for it's Win 98 projects, like KernelEx and Rev pack. Those programs are enabling things that Win 98 deliberately can't do.... just like the drivers.

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I wonder how difficult it would be to make a program that can convert a winxp driver to be vista compatable. They wouldn't really be able to do anything if a tool was released that does this. People would still have to download the original drivers. And they would only be modding drivers they are using on their own systems. No one would be distributing any of their drivers.

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I think this is where people are getting confused. Creative didn't want to develop new drivers, it's not that they aren't capable; they want you to buy a new card. It's a business strategy that is used everywhere, it's just the whiny little gamers and wanna be hackers/crackers that don't realize this. It's the same reason Microsoft stops supporting OS's. It's not because they have come up with something wonderful, they want you to spend your hard earned money so they somewhat force you to do it. Eventually everyone has to upgrade, your hardware might die and you find that nothing supports the old OS's anymore. It's really no different. I mean at least the card works, there's a lot of really expensive software out there that forces you to basically buy it again if you upgrade to Vista. They don't make patches or drivers, if you want and need the program and you upgrade to a new OS then you are forced to buy it again. Happens everyday in the real world. Why people think they are "owed" backwards compatibility and on going for life support is beyond me. If they aren't selling new sound cards how do you think they are going to pay the programmers that develop the support? Having a product that lasts forever is great for the consumer however if you are a business person you purposely design your products so you have some kind of "guaranteed" future.

A couple problems with this logic:

1) Creative is still selling the Audigy series sound cards (the cards in question). THAT is why people expect support.

2) Microsoft has had XP out for 7 years. They still support and sell it even though Vista is out... development costs are over, and security patches don't cost nearly as much. They'd want you to buy Vista, but they don't mind if you buy and use XP because it's almost all profit now. Same would apply for hardware. The longer you make something, the less it costs to make it.

3) You don't see Microsoft shutting down MSFN forums for it's Win 98 projects, like KernelEx and Rev pack. Those programs are enabling things that Win 98 deliberately can't do.... just like the drivers.

1. I would sell the cards too, I still have stock and it does work in Vista. I know mine did.

2. MS doesn't mind if you buy XP because they know in a few years you will have to buy Vista or the next OS anyway. It's win/win for them. It's like buying a server that they don't make parts for anymore. Sure I'll sell it too you, it's a profit for me rather than a loss. Now YOUR stuck with it. I'll see you in two years when your back to buy another because something failed.

3. This forum poses zero threat to MS's sales so they don't care. How many people are actually using 98? It's like a DOS project. No one cares because it has little to no impact. Creative would much rather you purchase an X-FI card for $$$$$ rather than the bargin bin Audigy $. Hey it's the latest and greatest anyway, why would you buy Vista and not want to upgrade everything???? (that's a joke)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I like it. I'm just saying it makes good busniess sense. Hell I have both cards and don't use either one. If I remember correctly when they sold the audigy it was supposed to have a flashable eprom so it would be the last card you would need. Great marketing scheme.

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The brand I went to several years ago after getting a bit upset with my last Creative card, and have been very happy with, has supported their products extremely well. Auzentech!!!!

I turned to them for DDL and never looked back. The X-Fi looked interesting when it came out, but still wasn't ready to dish out the money for it after having owned several Live and Audigy cards before it. The drivers were lacking and I figured a risk on a small company supporting a new product couldn't be worse then Creative was doing at the time. :rolleyes:

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I wonder how difficult it would be to make a program that can convert a winxp driver to be vista compatable. They wouldn't really be able to do anything if a tool was released that does this. People would still have to download the original drivers. And they would only be modding drivers they are using on their own systems. No one would be distributing any of their drivers.

Its not hard at all. Vista drivers work pretty much the same as XP drivers. I haven't had to do anything more than adding the Vista (Windows 6.0) support line and copy the DEV IDs into that section.

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A reply was finally posted. Not really an apology, but an explanation at least. Seems like it really was related to license issues with other companies. Could have been handled a lot better.

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