A Random Static

Some background: When XP was released, I was still using 98. I had no real reason to swap my system over to a new OS. No compelling reason anyway. It wasn’t until I was at a LAN party that someone offered up an install disc that I decided to swap over. About 2 years after release I was finally using XP. I enjoyed the OS and never looked back.

Microsoft then released the digital abortion which is Vista. Among the idiocy of different versions, driver problems galore and complaints that Vista is only XP with increased visuals and irritating security dialogs that dog your every mouse click I, and most of the business world, found ourselves choosing to stick with XP. Not a hard decision.

More inane chattering after the jump.

Fast Forward a few years and we start to hear gossip about the new Windows. There’s plenty of talk about ‘getting it right’ this time, offering the customers more of what they want, making the OS do what the customer wants, balancing security with ease of use. The rhetoric was thick. You’ll have to excuse me, and three quarters of the computer using world if we didn’t immediately believe everything we were being told.

Let me also qualify this whole thing by saying that if I didn’t get a student license for free from my educational institution there’s a very good chance I would not have bothered with the additional cost of upgrading.

The wife’s main board went tits up over the weekend and I took it as a sign to finally install a main board and cpu I picked up just over a year ago. This also gave me the opportunity to upgrade my OS.

I installed via USB thumbdrive, which in itself was an interesting experience and much nicer than having to burn a DVD just to install an OS. (We get the image from school via digital download so no physical disk is received) The install was uneventful. The only thing that threw me was the system’s requirements for a small partition (100MB?) as partition zero. After a few reboots I was into the OS.

Boot time was amazing. I was into the OS within 30 seconds. I loaded all the drivers for my mobo, video and network cards. Installed Firefox and 7zip. Realized I had forgotten to install the drivers for my audio card. Downloaded and attempted install.

BSOD.

This surprised me quite thoroughly. The rest of the install had gone SO smoothly and now this?

The card in question is a Creative X-Fi Extreme Music edition card. Very good card at a very good price about 6 years ago. It seems, however, that I am not the only person having this problem and Creative, for all intents and purposes, are not going to be updating their driver any time soon. So I am now in possession of a very nice piece of silicon that really doesn’t do anything though I’ll probably end up sliding it into my wife’s machine just to get more use out of it.

However, my new motherboard came with an Realtek chipset for sound and it’s doing a decent job of filling the missing sound card’s duties. This little fact will be remembered as I purchase more hardware in the future. Perhaps Creative won’t be getting anymore of my money in the future as on board sound is becoming more and more prevalent?

Get your shit together Creative. You used to be a damn fine hardware maker.