Vista - Creative Driver and Vista x64

Please help me for the following issue.

First thing: If memory serves, Creative drivers do not do AC3 or DTS decoding under Vista. The hardware is capable, but they have restricted the drivers. There is a guy on the Creative Labs forums that has hacked drivers that re-enable these (and other) features under Vista. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

On to the 3 speaker problem: have you tried using the Vista controls for altering your speakers and volume and such? Start > Control Panel > Sound > Playback tab > select "Speakers" and click Configure. You should see 7.1 as an available option. Procede from there.

You can change volume levels by runing "sndvol.exe"

itwally is correct. Creative Labs is not planning on releaseing in new Vista drivers for anything eccept the XFI-2.

Do what everyone ele has done.

Drop creative.

THey have made a fatal mistake IMO with their decision on how they are treating their faithful customers.

The person that itwally was talking about was treatend with legal action from creative and driven from the forum there.

Take my advice and use your onboard sound. Mine sounds great.

Creative is dead as far as myself and thousnds of others are concerned.

I remember when Creative screwed people big time with the driver issue, and I do know what guy joel406 is talking about...he put Creative to shame big time by altering the driver himself, even though Creative made such unstable and crappy drivers, this guy made them perfect, which in turn made Creative pissed, issued a stern warning to that guy, and before you knew it a ton of people sold off their cards, went even far as selling their stock options cause they treated him like s**t.
I was one of those people who HAD a Creative sound blaster extreme X-Fi, and was so pissed with Creative and their Vista drivers.
I sold mine permanently and used my EVGA 780i on board, and it sounds amazing.
Yes, Creative is seriously in trouble, the worse PR disaster in the history of that company.

Wrong, they have a new beta driver out for the X-Fi, and who knows when that will come out of beta, and Creative cards are known for their incompatibilities with 4GB's or more of ram on Vista.

They recently put out a new non beta driver for the Audigy cards, that restored Dobly Digital EX and DTS, but I still don't trust them. They still won't renable and support DVD Audio on 64bit Vista, only 32bit Vista.

The reason they're doing this is the recent mess over what Daniel K was doing with the drivers, and they decided they didn't like him fixing Creative's mess, and threatened him on their forums, and with legal papers that if he didn't quit, they were going to sue him. Needless to say, he had enough of Creative Labs, and is getting a couple of non Creative Labs soundcards, and will not having any to do with Creative Labs anymore. He didn't say what brand or what audio chip the soundcards he's getting use.

It was the mess of Creative cards, being a royal pain, no driver support hardly at all for the Audigy series of cards on Vista and problems with Creative cards going nutso in my machine inside of 6 to 9 months a couple of years ago, that I dumped Creative Labs and got a CMEDIA based card, which doesn't give me any trouble, not does it have the bloatware and the mess that Creative has. Creative still won't put out the applications that Audigy 2 has on XP in a Windows Vista 32bit or 64bit version.

What's even worse, is that a few months ago, it was revealed that Creative Labs was in such financial shape, they started selling the headquarters and it's associated buildings in Singapore.

Further more, what doesn't and didn't help Creative was all they could do was blame the snap crackle and pop issues with the X-Fi on motherboard chipsets such as Nvidia, ATI, ULI, and VIA, when in fact it was their card that wasn't truly PCI compliant, and they even wound up with some idiot, who thought he knew more than anyone else backing Creative's bullcookies, concerning the snap crackle and pop issues on the X-Fi also blaming the chipsets, don't know who the idiot was. Then Creative Labs and that idiot tried to blame Crossfire and SLI configures in the process of it all.

It was about this time, that more and more people, started to use their onboard sound, or get CMEDIA or VIA ENVY 24 based soundcards.

I still won't recommend anyone get a Creative card, and highly urge people to dump Creative Labs.

gr8 thanks all replies....

now im using daniel_k mod driver.that one is working fine without trouble @ moment in Vista x64.im going to update only the driver file from creative x-fi beta release.

Apart from the Daniel_k, another person also developing mod driver for creative drivers.He is also claiming,renables all features of x-fi and Audigy cards.It is called PAX driver.

IMO, nowaday Azuentech Auzen Prelude sound card is the very best soundcard card .They are using creative sound processor,but there is no restriction on audio features.Two weeks before they introduced new driver bundle (more than 200mb) and contains all features.

The creative drivers are so messy, half of it gets installed to program files x86. I dont know about anyone else, but i like having my hardware drivers all in 64 bit. There isnt even an uninstaller for the driver package in add/remove programs which is usually a sign of bad quality.

The only way they're going to sort this out is to start the drivers from scratch, & all of it in 64 bit for us with x64 o/s.

If they release a new card instead of sorting the drivers out, i dont think ill buy it. I have this feeling they've done it on purpose so that you spend another £50+ on the xfi2, only for it not to work on windows 7, then they bring out another card that will work with that.

What Creative's solution is, rather than sort out the driver mess on the current X-Fi and Audigy cards, is to work on X-Fi 2, and that alone is a joke.