Wow. Registering for this IS a pain. But I'm here now.

I want to thank Daniel_K for what he did for everyone, and also I want to thank all the posters for propping up and passing along this story.

I used to own a computer shop (ISA days onward) and sold lots of Creative hardware. Even then there were lots of painful driver issues. Creative is a company I remember best for making it very very hard to figure out which model of card was installed in a machine... no markings on the boards, no way to interrogate the hardware. What a pain!

I don't run that business any more - someone else does, but this week coincidentally I was going to start specing out the hardware for some media servers for myself, and for friends and family.. not a huge project, important and fun for us.

Thanks for making this information available. There will be no Creative Labs hardware or boards with Creative chip on them, in the systems I will build. When I publish the specs so that other people can quickly copy them and make their own media machines, the hardware recommendations will just say to avoid Creative Labs hardware, and will point to all possible alternatives.

Thanks again everyone. Creative: go away. Even if you are right by the letter of the law, you had MANY options and you chose the most vicious. Screw you. I assuredly cannot support that kind of behaviour with my money and you will never see another dollar of it.

I've been a Creative customer since 2001 and after reading some of this thread I have to say goodbye to Creative Labs. Next month I was going to upgrade my Nomad Zen to the latest model and now, thanks to Creative's backward thinking, I now have to find another brand. Thanks >

[quote=OLBaID]Daniel I applaud your efforts and have already dismissed creative products for any builds personally or through my business. I was forced to BUY Creative Vista Drivers before they decided to release them (9.99) for a product that was less than 1 year old. I have bought creative sound cards for 100's of pc's that I have built and witnessed shoddy drivers and support by this company that so wants to protect a TURD of an IP. Being in the gaming community since 1993 I know thousands of other gamers from LAN events and through Clans and various games, the consensus is that Creative can only be crippled by us hardcore builders/gamers by boycott of all products. I would rather have onboard sound than deal with this PR nightmare called Creative. Some of my threads during my outrage of buying vista drivers where removed with many others, Creative can not deal with criticism of their own products by consumers that just want a product that works as advertised. Creative KARMA will get your bunk product/services through word of mouth and the disdain you have created by all of this cheap nickel and dimming of long supporting customers. GOOD DAY and Good Riddance![/quote]

Are you telling me Creative charged you for updated drivers?

Thats crazy.

Creative, what is wrong with you. I know you're watching this thread. Yet even after the two pages of replies you ignore us and reply only to Daniel_K. Well guess what: there's 12 pages of angry customers. Somewhere around 200 people are very upset at you, and about half are saying they will no longer purchace Creative products. This post is on the frontpage of Reddit and is already on Digg.

This is your oppertunity to resolve this. With your finances already in danger, do you really want most of your customers to leave? You need to do something to make this right.

CREATIVE,no comment for your movement!This is the last card Creative for my!

Sorry for my English..

Not so much pay for drivers. Here's a good summary of what Creative had to do.

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1726

A fair enough overview, but handled poorly, again. A coupon incentive to upgrade to a newer product would probably have helped stymie the inevitable backlash and cry of bad taste from customers.

I am surprised that Creative Labs truly thinks that the community and owners of CL products would approve and back such a move against Daniel. To openly threat him in the forums us just plain stupid. The image damage is and will be tremendous. This story made it to the frontpage of various online tech magazines.

Since Creative Labs is not able or does intentionally not release full featured software and drivers for their high end audio products they are just driving customers away.

If you ask me, Daniel did a great service to all of us. He may have infringed copyrights or violated patents or whatever. But CL has not kept their obligation to its customers in terms of support.

And in the age of Vista it becomes more and more the same which audio brand you buy. EAX is not what it used to be and without proper support and working hardware it just doesn't cut it.

CL hurt itself more than they know by this.