Verily I say unto thee, that Linonut spake thusly:
> Wow. I'd have thought they'd let you download the driver for free.
It's not the first time.
I've personally also had to buy a driver CD from Creative ... still got
it right here:
"Creative Live!Ware 3.0 Installation CD ... Online Sale Edition
© 1999 Creative Technology Ltd.
P/N: 0450000639
CD ASSY: 1473330784
This CD-ROM Contains
Drivers for Windows 95/98/NT4.0
AudioHQ
Creative Launcher with Live!Task
Creative PlayCenter
Creative WaveStudio
Creative Lava!
Sound Blaster Live! Experience
EAX3.0 Demo
MediaRing Talk '99
MiniDisc Center"
IOW - drivers, launcher toolbars, a simple wav editor, a VOIP client,
and a tool for playing MiniDiscs ... somehow (never did investigate).
Lava was pretty cool. Some kind of animated OGL/DX blobby thing that
danced in time to the music (think Lava Lamp). Like so many of
Creative's other bundled apps, it was quickly abandoned.
This was all stuff that came with my SBLive on the included V1 CD, but
various Windows updates b0rked their drivers and apps, and so to get
everything working again I had to buy the V2 CD @ £10 (IIRC) in 1999,
then this V3 CD for another £10 (IIRC) in 1999.
I also seem to remember that various apps were "depreciated" between
Live!Ware releases, which I found incredibly irritating. IIRC there was
one called Prody Parrot (voice recognition), which was not included
after V1. This might not have been a big deal were it not for the fact
that you had to completely *uninstall* the *whole* previous Live!Ware
installation in order to install the new one, thus losing forever the
previously bundled apps (no individual installers AFAICR).
There was also some kind of "service", whose purpose I never did quite
comprehend, that was part of the upper toolbar thingie. Whatever it was,
it never did work correctly in V1 (connection failure), and IIRC it just
disappeared completely in version 2. I think it was meant to be an early
form of RSS feed or update service, or something. The fact that it never
worked bugged the hell out of me, but somehow when they just dropped it
altogether that annoyed me even more. It was like "now I'll never know".
Oh well.
Some drivers *were* made available for download ... weeks or months
after the retail CDs were made available, but to get updated versions of
*all* the apps, you had to buy these Live!Ware CDs.
A couple of years later I upgraded to XP, and lost most of the advanced
functionality (e.g. S/PDIF passthrough). AFAIK they never did release a
Live!Ware disk for XP users, and indeed it took them so long to release
fully functional drivers, that I'd long since moved on to new hardware
(Intel audio).
Given the X-Fi fiasco, their utter contempt for customers, their lax
attitude towards support, their seemingly constantly b0rken Windows
drivers, their virtually non-existent Linux support, and their grossly
overpriced and over-hyped products, frankly I doubt very much I will
ever buy another Creative sound card, or any other outboard sound card
for that matter (why bother?).
I've still got the card. It's gathering dust in an old P3/350 system in
the loft, hence my retention of the driver disk. I doubt very much if
I'll use it ever again.
[Frisbee] Damn ... missed.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Computer games don’t affect kids, I mean if Pac man affected us as
| kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills
| and listening to repetitive music." - Kristian Wilson, Nintendo
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Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.21-1.3194.fc7
04:34:37 up 5 days, 3:29, 3 users, load average: 0.20, 0.35, 0.38
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