Creative charging $9.99 for its sound card to work perfectly on Vista
By Ruben Francia
Creative Labs has released the Creative Alchemy Audigy Edition software package for users of its Sound Blaster Audigy sound cards on Windows Vista. The software allows Vista users to take advantage of hardware-accelerated DirectSound3D and EAX audio. But there’s a catch.
The software package costs users an extra $US9.99. It’s required because of changes made by Microsoft to its audio engine within DirectX on Vista. Basically, the audio engine was taken out, which means that many sound cards that worked perfectly well with XP, no longer work with Vista.
The decision to charge users for a software patch has caused controversy, and raised consumer questions like: “Is this a driver update or a software update? Why should I as a consumer pay for the software that is fixing a problem caused by Microsoft?â€
While this is the first time we’ve seen a vendor charge for a software patch, it could set a trend where consumers have to pay on a regular basis for updates, whether the release is an update of a driver or a software update.
Consumers should be worried by this kind of development. I mean, what’s to stop any vendor doing the same thing?
Hardware manufacturers should continue to provide develop and provide software updates regularly, they should stay away from the software business. They should clear up their mind and think straight that providing software updates is their support to customers who already paid them when they bought the hardware.
The decision by Creative to charge customers for the software package is for going to create bad publicity, especially since some Creative customers are already getting emotional over this development.
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July 8th, 2007
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July 10th, 2007
Fair play to Creative:
There is FREE Vista driver for Audigy:
http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/SOUND-CARD/CREATIVE/Creative-Sound-Blaster-Audigy-124-Driver-2120002-WHQL.shtml
Creative charges $10 for Alchemy - this is software not a driver update. Without that Audigy works as good as any other sound card in Vista.
ALchemy is not a driver, it is some sort of emulator software to allow for hardware acceleration Direct X sound aborted in Vista.
April 1st, 2008
The Vista driver is a crippled version of the XP driver, not allowing customers to use the product purchased to its specifications. (Note my product was bought before they put the legalese footnotes stating that it would not work with Windows Vista).