Thus far, the Creative Labs Vista Audigy drivers have been pretty crap. I frequently get bursts of static over any audio, and only a reboot of my Media Center will fix it. But they’re betas: I can cut them some slack.
Yesterday, up popped a nice dialog box stating that my drivers would expire tomorrow, and that I could uninstall them. I didn’t see the popup until today, because it popped up behind Media Center. How handy.
Faced with a choice of a) downloading a new set of drivers, or b) running my Media Center without sound, I opted for option A.
Or, I’d like to opt for option A. Creative’s US support site is currently telling me that it “Can’t locate any sites with current domain/port credentials”, and the European support site can’t be found. It would appear that “dev1-eusite.cle.creaf.com.creative.com/support/downloads” isn’t online.
Interestingly, if I pick “Vatican City” as my location, I can work my way through a set of Italian pages and locate a new driver. Hopefully it’ll be in English.
I can’t help but imagine the Pope, tutting infallibly to himself as his Media Center pops up a message about the expiration of his sound drivers, but content in the knowledge that, it’s ok, he can download a new set of drivers from Creative. It really is all about who you know, isn’t it?
Fingers crossed: hopefully these drivers will be in English, fix my static problem, and make the Pope a very happy man.
The Lord works in mysterious ways Daniel. I certainly do hope that the Pontiff has an army of developers working studiously in San Pietro (actually they’re probably what actually down in St. Peter’s tomb) recoding Sims 2: Pope for Vista and making sure it doesn’t need ‘God rights’ to run. Ooh..
I uninstalled the Beta Catalyst drivers for my ageing ATI 9700 Pro and went with the raw Vista ones and I’ve noticed no difference in performance. Although everything I try to play on my Vista PC that uses DirectX 9 says “are you mental? don’t you realise these drivers are out of date!?”. All being well come the end of the month when Vista (or ‘Wista’ as I imagine Chekov from Star Trek saying it) is released to the public most of these drivers will be finalised.
Now where did I put the rosary beeds?