Well, I've bought my last Creative product, based on the information in this thread. I actually registered so I can tell you that. Which is sad, since I've probably bought about 10 cards in the last 12 years or so.

I hope you go under.

Cheers,

Mark

This is sad news, as an owner of Creative Lab products, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, SB16, SB16-Scsi2, SB Audigy 1, Creative HD (Dell Laptop) , and an X-Fi, I'm very disappointed in your decision. I have sold your sound cards for years, when I worked at CompUSA. As a government employee I stop by your FOSE booth every year, and BS with friends that work for Creative Labs, that I have known from my time at CompUSA. Heck your HD audio for my laptop is just a software program Creative wrote to overlap my HD Sigmatel sound card. This company just thinks that name recognition will sell sound cards, and basically get rid of someone who cared for the cards you didn't want to support with full featured drivers anymore. From this moment, until Creative Lab management is sane again, no government purchases from my agency, or from my family and friends.

Thank you

Eric.

xi-fi owner here... (on XP, haven't switched to vista for... reasons of utter suckage). only registered because i saw this on digg.

gonna admit, i barely passed first year logic & reason in college, but what baffles me is that

1. creative accuses daniel k of "theft".

2. creative cripples features on vista that were enabled on older operating systems?

... pretty awesome doublespeak here. taking away features that a customer has already paid for, and then accusing a community member of theft for reenabling something that a customer originally had on an older operating system.

this corporate douchebaggery is epic and full of fail.

Dear Stupid

(or "guy from Creative Labs who started this thread", to use your full title),

I was, previously, a Creative Labs customer. I bought a few of your much-older-gen soundcards (AWE32, AWE64, and an SB Live Value something-or-other). The drivers were ALWAYS bloody awful.

A while ago, the line-in connector on my SB Live started failing intermittently. When I did my most recent Massive PC Upgrade, I switched over to using the perfectly adequate on-motherboard sound chipset and didn't bother putting my SB Live card back in.

I think I'll post it back to you, anonymously, in order to make it YOUR problem to safely dispose of. It wouldn't be good for the environment for me to just throw it out with all the regular household rubbish.

(And yes, I really did only register here to join the massed chorus of people telling you that we're disgusted with your actions, we hate you, and will never buy your lame poorly-supported products again.)

JohnZS,

Sorry, I thought you were a moderator. I think I might have gotten you and Dale-CL confused. Sorry. Regardless of what CL's initial concerns about Daniel_k's actions were the fact is that the worms are crawling around everywhere now. What this has done is blow the lid completely off what appears to be CL's business strategy going back what appears to be years. Whole entire support models arose to deal with crappy CL drivers. Countless manhours and money was spent troubleshooting poor driver implementations. Who knows how pervasive this is at CL.

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Shane2 wrote:
Don't expect any response from the staff to any of your criticism, they are clearly too arrogant to address any of it. They have already backpedaled over the Audigy support pack, and are starting to make themselves look like clueless imbociles. The fact this is front page news on so many big sites will only deepen their shame.

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6412MontegoCt

With no mention of the profit from donations I will assume that you believe that at least on that level, it is illegal. Now onto the profits, must a company support a product for all time from creation until the company goes out of business, the same thing works in the software world. Companies no longer support thier older versions of products once a new version comes out to "force" people to buy the new software, so how is this any different. I do agree that this is a bad move but it is fully within thier right.

"The decrease in audio product sales was mainly due to a decrease in sales of low-end audio sound cards." from the same report (and from your post) may also be a reason for thier discontinued support, if sales are decreasing on low-end cards try to increase sales on high-end cards.

Why are all you Windoze fanboys whining? You love getting the shaft, that's why you stick with M$. Now Creative has shafted you and you whine like babys. Yeesh! They only gave you what you long for... the shaft. You should be thanking Creative.

Now, Windows fanboys, do what you usually do and hammer out your posts about how us Linux snobs poking fun at you turns you off of Linux. Guess what... it makes no difference to us whether you stay M$ zombies for the rest of your luzer lives. In fact we want you to stay with Windoze because you're all so darn hilarious. And we don't like you bimbos clogging up our forums with "Jist onstilled Loiniux, warez muh C:" so just keep doing what you do best. That's right, bend over, relax the cheeks, you know the drill and you love it.

@Creative... love the way you just gashed your own throat wide open.... friggin hilarious!!