Creative shut down 3rd party driver that fixes Creatives broken drivers

[Bryce W]

Ive been reading alot of whats happening on the Creative Forum.
Creatives drivers for some of their newer hardware doesnt work properl on Vista even though the product is listed as Vista compatible. Some coder edited the drivers, fixed the problem and provided them to the creative community. Basically, Creatives broken hardware was fixed by this guy.

Anyway, Creative send a cease-and-desist to this coder and force him to take it down. Here is the backlash from the community.
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

To make matters worse, it appears its not just about Creative having crappy developers, it appears that Creative neutered the functionality of their cards on purpose under Vista, which this coder also found out.
Im assuming Creative did this so they could force customers to buy new hardware.

Check it out, its a good read. The customers forum posts are intellgent and insightful.

[Jory]

The story I seen says creative only licensed certain technology for Windows XP so for them to enable those features on their official drivers they would have to pay the licensing fees again.

If that's the truth they are complete morons. No one negotiating the licensing agreement thought the hardware would survive an entire OS cycle? There is really no excuse for it either way.

[syst3merror]

after reading this and understanding that Creative KNOWINGLY created the incompatibility issues so that users would have to buy new hardware....I will NEVER buy creative products again and I really have to think twice about offering support dealing with their products.

For someone to fix the issue and Creative to threaten him with legal actions shows what kind of company this really is and how much they care about their customers.

Screw Creative!

[Holzster]

I bought 3-4 Creative stuff a week - not any more!!

[Bryce W]

I personally stopped using them a long time ago. Had some nasty BSOD's with sound drivers. If I was still using them, I would stop using them after this.

[Blues]

Creative peeked like 5+ yrs ago and then went down hill the way of the money hungry large corperation. There are now plenty of good alternatives in the mid-high end card($60+) and for low end on-board audio has come a long way. So yeah we can easily avoid them the only thing they offer and it has been enabled on some competitors cards using creative's chipset is in the gaming realm.

[Bryce W]

A followup on the whole issue from the modder it was referencing:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/daniel_k-who-fi.html