Creative Vista support causes people to
fume
Sound and Fury
By Dean Pullen: Wednesday 14 February 2007, 10:51
THROUGHOUT THE BETA testing of Vista, one problem with some of our
test machines was more prominent than others. When testing using a
Creative Audigy sound-card or similar, various problems with the
Vista installation would ensue. (See Creative offers workaround for
Vista gaming sound)
Like many hardware outfits, Creative appears to have been somewhat
tardy developing and releasing Vista drivers, and some months
passed between official releases of beta drivers.
Now, nearly a month after the release of the retail versions of
Windows Vista, Creative still lacks non-beta driver support for the
majority of the company's products. A quick scan of Creative's Vista driver availability
chart reveals current support for Vista for less than half of
modern Creative product.
Many 'older' products have their driver development listed as 'No
Development Planned' - for example the four year old external
Extigy sound-card.
It should be noted that Creative's newest devices seemingly have
Vista support - both the new X-Fi external Xmod has embedded native
support, and the X-Fi Xtreme Audio has final non-beta 32-bit
drivers (though without any working audio console application, and
no 64-bit availbility). Interestingly the rest of the new
top-of-the-range X-Fi series drivers are still in beta.
Most drivers are listed as being available in Q1 2007, which is
specifically marked as "the end of March". Considering the time
spent thus far, and the trickle of availability, we'll be keeping a
close eye on Creative to see if the company actually keeps to these
deadlines.
Audigy owners take note of the official line on support of your
fairly modern sound-cards; X-Fi owners come first.
We've been monitoring the
Creative forums for some time now, and many enraged customers have
posted and flamed Creative support demanding Vista compatible
drivers that don't BSOD their machines (one of our beta
installations of Vista had to be restored after a newly installed
beta driver BSOD'd the machine consistently on
start-up).
The situation has got so heated
that a non-abusive post stance had to be announced by the forum
moderators. Randomly closing threads hasn't helped ease the
situation.
Mass postings of crashing problems, limited application support,
limited channels, missing sounds, popping/noise, Windows not
recognising devices - even with allegedly final drivers, have
appeared on Creative's forums for some time now. Many have resorted
to using XP drivers to some degree of success.
We'd like to post more examples of the extreme levels of anger and
questioning from Creative customers on the forums, but there would
simply be too many links to make this article readable - a very
quick perusal of the community response should allow anyone to
gauge the level of animosity.
Of course the problem isn't limited to just Creative, but even the
posters on the forums recognise other (and smaller) companies
already have driver support - a growing list of compatible sound
cards for Vista are listed within this post.
Consumers could probably live with the driver delays from the likes
of Creative and Nvidia if Vista had shipped when promised. Instead
Vista has been languishing in beta form for some extraordinary
amount of time, time which could have been spent developing and
polishing much needed driver-support for existing product.
Opps...another one. 
Creative mp3 and hardwares softwares not
compatible with Vista. 
