Creative caught crippling their products!!!

[Xpirate]

The guy was working on their drivers. He was able to point out where Creative inserted bugs into the drivers to make them not work. He was able to point out where Creative put their OS validation, whereby, if you were running on Vista, the portions of the software would not work....

There were other users that used the sound card drivers from XP, and had them installed on their Vista machines, and the cards worked fully. It was the new "Vista Compatible" drivers that broke their stuff. And it was "broken" on purpose.

I guess I did not read enough. I used to be impressed with Creative Labs. I have not purchased a sound card in quite a while because on-board sound is usually good enough for me.

[J-Roc]

That, is *precisely* what happened here. People bought a premium sound card a few years back, a sound card that worked without issue... *until* they installed it into Vista, and Creative crippled the card because they wanted the users to upgrade.

Thats not exactly what happened though. All cards including there premium x-fi's didnt work properly either. I doupt it was so intentional like its been made out to be. Allthough, if i was running the company i wouldnt want people to know that a 10yr old !Live 24 card that can be bought for $30 new was a x-fi card once the "crystalizer" was enabled.

[The boy 4rm oz]

True true. Some one was going to find out sooner or later. We are modders for christ's sake, if it doesn't work we find our own ways around the problems.

[Quakken]

It's their fault, they are doing this to themselves.

Let's face it though, you can pretty much buy one sound card, and if you don't need to go to 5.1 or something and you aren't looking for ways to throw away your money, you can stick with that same pci card for years. Until I got my M-audio pro box, I was using a ten year old audigy from an old computer we had (the on board was crackly). It worked perfectly.

In their defense, they had to find some way to get users to buy new cards. But this isn't the correct way to do it, of course. This is probably the worst way, but aside from making some amazing new technology what other choice did they have? Sure, it's mean but it's either this or continually lose profits and go belly up (or find some other way to get people to buy new products.)