now that I've had a chance to get some fresh, warm, humid air
i know that all to well, i got alot of polish blood, as well as irish/scotish, some of the most stuborn people you will ever meet but mostly good folks.
yep, even moreso with baltic peoples . . . . once the pride and stubborness kick in - it's no longer about the argument
creative are not fun to work with, their tech support as mentioned above(last page) will YELL at you, their staff involved with projects like working with game developers are just as bad, im SURE part of why ms droped it was due to how creative is to work with, and nvidia very well could have left the project due to being sick of fighting with creative, i have seen that happen with games, some of the people i use to do computer work for where game developers, this may sound shocking but most of them dont really know much about whats inside the puter, they just know their part of the dev prosess, that thats it, well every singel one of them had nothing nice to say about working with creative to support new eax fetures or work out buggs with eax and creatives drivers, comments like "they are a bunch of assholes" where common, now most of those dev's had creative cards because at the time creative was THE card choice for "true gamers".
I completely believe it. I even wondered if after nVidia left the development, it turned into MS and Creative butting heads over how things were going to go. No one really knows, as even that info on the MS+Creative+nVidia collaboration is fairly unknown - and I can't even remember where I read that . . . MaximumPC, I think
Plus, their tech support is stoopid - every once and a while I throw an email their way with some BS dumb issue I've made up just to see what kind of responses I'll get - all I can say is that they are 100% predictable at this point, and even if you come across as being tech knowledgable, they respond to you like your a tech illiterate n00b. Like I mentioned earlier, their poor support was what drove me to start the X-Fi thread here, so that users out there could have somewhere they could look up typical issues and ask questions and get real answers. From what I've seen over the last couple of years, you couldn't go asking questions on the Creative forums due to the number of trolls that hang out there, so . . .
yeah, i acctual have seen stuff like that but most of the x-fi problems i have seen are dirrectly due to the drivers, most dell owners dont go out and buy a soundcard, they use the onboard, and if they buy a soundcard they get the cheapist one they can get(because most dell owners are cheap bastards, hence they own a dell)
a little of both, most of the driver issues I've seen usually resulted from an improper/corrupted install, or something similar.
I can say, though, that their driver download links aren't always labeled correctly. I don't think their driver team does enough support testing, either. For example, I've found for the longest time that all of the X-Fi update drivers for the XP Media Center Edition are all incompatible, as much as the drivers list the OS as being supported. That turns into a headache for the customer, and for those trying to help the users.
yes it is wrong to remove fetures the card was sold supporting, they didnt do that with older cards when you went from 9x to xp or 2k to xp, video card makers dont remove dx9 support on cards that support it because they want to sell new cards to vista users......same diffrance in my book, this is all on creative.
and im glad that ubi brought back 10.1 im sure it was due to public presure and not wanting to look like they where pandering to nvidia to give nvidia an unfair advantege by removing it.... got any links to reviews of the 2nd patch, would like to see if there appears to be any under handed tricks being used to keep the perf of ati vs nvidia from changing between the 10.0 and 10.1 paths.
I see your point, as I think it wrong as well - but we'll never know if it was just meant to be a temporary thing, and the ongoing debacle with the dan_k drivers just blew up during the middle of it.
I also see your point with the VGA adapter argument - but at the same time, they'd never have to worry about dropping support like that. If you want to keep up with the newest games, you've got to upgrade the video card sooner or later, y'know? It's rough to be able to keep going with current games on a video card thats 3-4 years old, much less 5-6.
I had mentioned in other threads a while ago, the audio card, from any manufacturer, outlasts just about every other piece of hardware in a rig (unless you're an audiophile and constantly wanting the newest thing
). They're not subjected to the same rigors as other pieces of hardware, and for 90% of users, as long as it still sounds alright, there's nothing wrong with the card. I mean, hell, just for example, I just finally convinced my father last month to upgrade from his . . .
ENSONIQ PCI!! That's right, the first sound card that got away from the ISA standard . . . the first PCI soundcard, and one of the first true multi-channel cards. That thing is 12+ years old at this point, but still works fine (even in Vista . . . surprisingly). He just didn't see a point considering the card still worked.
IDK, I guess I just think the notion of people wanting to hold onto an audio card for more than 5-7 years, and expecting it to function properly in the most recent WIN OS to hit shelves is kinda unrealistic.
thats easy, my maddog cmedia based 8738 soundcard, full vista drivers that WORK PERFECTLY updated from the cmedia forums(the guy who uploads to forums dosnt have acces to update the site....diffrent dept)
I'm just curious as I'm not sure . . . those are the official drivers? C-Media doesn't always keep up with updating their site, as the most recent driver release for the 8738 based cards is dated 2002.
TBH, I don't really keep up with C-Media chipsets too much, as they like to do little "tweaks" here and there for different manufacturers . . . makes it hard to keep up when 3 different card manufacturers are using the CMI8788 chipset, but each one has a version that's "tweaked" just for them
the DMCA dirrectly battles fair use laws, and it tends to loose, its the one big thing i would like to kick bill clinton in the nuts for, dumbass admited in a tv callin show (people call in with questions and he would answer) that he really didnt understand the DMCA he just signed it, the people pushing it made it sound like a good deal....didnt mention that it didnt allow him to copy his own cd's as backups for use in the car
yep - sad, IMO. DMCA is a load of crock, IMO, and doesn't nullify the original copyright act of 86 . . . which is dumb becasue the two acts contradict each other.
I still go by the old school rule, though, and will backup my software, CDs, DVDs, etc as I see fit - even if I have to break copy protection to do so. By the old act, I'm within my rights as long as I don't make numerous copies and/or distribute copies.
creative clearly did this to try and force ppl to buy their next big card, as the dolby support, its because creative refused to pay for a dolby licence for the cards, thats the only reasion, really dolby cant go after creative and win if its a user made mod/hack that enables said fetures, so its just creative wanting to keep their older products as crippled as possable in order to push their owners into buying the new cards they are working to bring out.
this is an old and well established practice in the computer industry that software makers and some hardware makers use, its died off a bit since companys that pull that crap tend to die when users disscover that they can choose something like a c-media based soundcard vs creative without loosing anything they will acctualy notice, and get longer support cycles.
cmedia still sells alot of chips and companys using their chips still sell alot of cards dispite the insainly long support cmedia is giving to chips like the 8738(hell i have seen 8738 based cards on newegg in the past year) mind you the 8738 is the same age as the sblive first run cards!!!!!!
my initial impression of the whole issue when it erupted a couple of months ago, was that it could be an issue with Creative and Auzen - as Auzentech had Dolby encoding enabled, Creative didn't (although their cards were capable). Dolby encoding was a big selling point with the Prelude . . . but, based on Creative's reaction then, I had gotten the feeling that they were being pressured to act.
But, it's very true, though, that hardware manufacturers will sometimes kill or disable features as time goes on . . . they just don't trip over themselves and publicly admit to it like Creative did. That little incident right there, IMO, will go down in the list of top-10 biggest tech blunders. Partly why I think they were pressured to act, if it was of their own accord, you think they would've at least reviewed it a little better . . .
and after reading this post my openion of YOU has changed, but my openion of how your earlyer posts in this thred came off hasnt
now go play some games or something
s'all good - I'm just trying to shed some light on the other sides of the argument, that's all. There are a lot of Creative bashers out there who go on without any real definitive argument, and there are also many who just enjoy the mob-mentality. But, in trying to show the other side of the argument, I realize I'm going to come across as being a fanboi (and it helps that I can stay reasonably level-headed as well
), especially to those who are fed up with the companies practices, and even moreso when the subject matter is as heated as the issue with the dan_k drivers has been.
