Nathan Davis01 November 2006, 3:05 AM
Judging by Creative's almost total lack of Vista drivers, it seems the next-gen OS has crept up on Creative and taken it by surprise. That is, in itself, surprising, since the company was at the recent WinHEC conference in Seattle spouting off about how great its commitment to Vista was.
Two weeks ago, we invited Creative Australia to comment on the parlous state of its Vista drivers.
Earlier this week, we reminded Creative's top marketing wig, Vaiju Deb, about our enquiry and said we'd be going ahead with an article whether Creative chose to respond or not.
It turns out our questions are a bore, as we haven't since heard a single peep.
One such question was why an operating system, now in the second release candidate, no-longer-a-beta stage, remains almost totally unsupported by Creative -- unlike nVIDIA, for example, which now offers fully supported, WHQL-certified graphics drivers for its video cards under Vista RC2.
See? Sheesh, my eyes are falling loose here.
Which sound cards won't be supported under Vista, and why, was another snore-worthy question. Have a peek at this list of (un)supported devices.
Around the time RC2 arrived, Creative released partially functional drivers for Vista RC1. We hear they don't utterly suck, but mostly blow, which is by far a better state of existence, I'm sure you'll agree.
Of course, only the mundane and useless items are missing from the drivers, so issues such as the Control Panel freezing up in Headphone mode, the complete lack of EAX and CMSS-3D support, or even 6.1 and 7.1 speaker modes not fully functional are merely moot points.
Creative might as well go ahead and release this as the final supported driver, which we suspect is likely, anyway. That's 100% delicious efficiency at work, right there.
Interestingly, one rejoicing owner reports that his unsupported drivers will expire on November the 4th -- all quite conveniently, of course. These things have a way in being somewhat useful. It's just like when you lose an expensive ring to the drain -- it's the perfect excuse to buy a new one, only in this case the new one will work as if it were already in the drain.
Considering Creative's exceptional level of support for its Vista drivers and -- although reasonable -- lethargic response to our questions, it appears to be living up to its immensely inspirational image. Allaying concerns by answering dull questions is only counter-intuitive to this, particularly when customer satisfaction is at an all-time high.
Of course, if ever the frat boy wants to don its boredom cap, Creative knows where to find us.
But keeping a reputation is often more important, kids.