Ryan Price's Blog

Creative… the once prominent company which had such a following with gamers for their resilient  sound cards. The problem started when I bought a brand new Creative X-Fi Fatality Professional series card. The creative name was a name of success. At least that was until I migrated my setup to Windows Vista shortly after RTM. Thinking i would enjoy the same sound quality as i did on XP with my Audigy 2, I went to creatives website and downloaded their drivers for Windows Vista..what i got was a crackling and popping $149 piece of crap. During the span of Windows Vista’s life cycle..The face of creative has changed. They simply do not care to support Vista, or solve any of the problems that their cards are having. Instead they blame Nvidia, at the time a motherboard chipset maker who made the successful NForce 4 chipset for the AMD CPU.

Recently i wanted to try my luck again and stumbled upon a man who decided to become a one man wreaking crew. Daniel_K , managed to do what an entire crew at Creative couldn’t. Successfully tweak, fix and unlock the X-Fi Drivers so that they would work properly in Vista. After doing such a good service to his fellow die hard creative users, Creative went so far as to file a motion to sue them, the guy who basically saved your card and franchise from going belly up and you SUE him? I’d be offering the guy a metal of honor and a job to boot. Needless to say…I have since downloaded the SB X-Fi Prelude drivers that Daniel has released and have been running full speed 24-bit 192,000Hz in Vista SP1 AND Windows 7 7057…I have a new found love for my card now and do not have to worry that if i reboot weather or not it will snap,crackle, or pop. Thanks Daniel for all your hard work and being a die hard X-Fi user!