Nothing new here. Creative's shit drivers (and cards). And to a lesser extent, pos vista. People just need to quit buying that crap and let creative go under. They can't make anything worth a shit (and never have in the audio arena).
Hell, I was even stupid enough to buy an X-Fi and it died. They use the cheapest, chinese crap capacitors known to man, but charge top dollar. I hope they all rot in a shallow grave.
:shadedshu
Why is it that because DirectSound and audio acceleration doesn't work in Vista, everyone wants to go and blame Creative. It's Microsoft's problem, not Creatives. At least the Alchemy drivers are a means of working around the "flaws" of Vista.
And why is it that it's now currently trendy to hate Creative? I'm sorry, but the X-Fi series was the first set of soundcards that have had a long string of problems, and a lot of it had to do with such a radical new design to their audio processor - then factor in all the other new hardware on the market and the vast number of people that don't know what they're doing and are trying to add a new, powerful sound card to legacy hardware.
I've used Creative's hardware for as long as I can remember, since a Sound Blaster 2.0 all the way up to a Live!. Back then, there was no other company on the market, and even after new companies rolled out, nothing compared to Creative's hardware. Granted, as I said, the first wave of X-Fi's had some issues, especially with capacitors - but I think that can all be attributed to the fact that they didn't realize that the X-Fi audio processor
needs a heatsink. The newer revisions are fairly solid, with very little actual hardware issues anymore - the majority of problems tends to be with conflicting drivers and/or conflicting hardware.
Asides - you're not going to find any other company on the market that offers a better sounding audio card for $80 - if you want to compare low-end to low-end. If you want to compare high-end cards . . . sure, the Auzentechs blow Creative away in that arena, but they still use Creative's audio processor - they just opted for higher end components (which is why the price of their audio cards is higher). But Creative's high-end card still sounds amazing compared to all other competitors (aside from Auzen), and if nothing else - they perform blazingly faster than any other competitor (has a lot to do with their design for use in studio audio equipment).
As to Creative needing to go under . . .
it'll never happen! There's a better chance of nVidia or Intel sinking before Creative does.
