Creative makes sound cards.  Sure they make alot of other things now, but they built their business on sound cards.  They succeeded a thrived in the very early PC market to make soundout of PCs better and better.  This is where the good part ends.

There are many constants in PC hardware, and one of those is that Creative drivers suck.  I mean, there are other companies known to have substandard drivers or to not make very frequent updates.  But I bet if there was a poll of the ones most well known for this, Creative would clearly be at the top.  Another bad thing Creative is known for is misleading advertising and product specifications.  By misleading I mean total untruths.  No matter how many times their shady product details are revealed for the truth they are by many respected hardware reviewers, they still seem to one-up themselves.

I won’t be going into the whole history of this, because frankly it just requires a few words in Google like “creative misleading” or “creative shady” or something similar,  and you will get more than you will ever want to read.  And you know what you won’t find?  You won’t find one Creative representative denying any of it.

But, this article is about some current topics.

First: Creative has a second-wave of X-Fi sound cards.  These sound cards are different from the previous few X-Fi sound cards in one important way:  They don’t have an X-Fi chip in them at all!

Second: Creative doesn’t want your old non-X-Fi card to work in Windows Vista.   Y’see, Creative hardware of past generations work fine in Vista.  There is absolutely nothing hardware oriented keeping them from working, and working well.  But Creative won’t make drivers for them.  Not only that, but when a intrepid user modified the drivers for the Audigy card he owned, Creative handed him the Cease and Desist rigamarole. (Because that link is straight to the Creative forums, and possibly could be modified or removed at any time, I include the post in it’s entirety after the break.)

Read the rest of this entry »