Creative gave out ALchemy for free --but only if you were an X-Fi owner. If you were an Audigy owner, you were stuck with a ten-buck charge.

Creative making this free is too little, too late. I've owned the vast majority of halfway decent sound cards they released (starting with the Soundblaster 1.5 back in 1992, and ending with an X-Fi XtremeGamer at present), this kind of treatment, along with their deliberate crippling of functionality in Audigy and X-Fi drivers penalizing those that upgraded to Vista (when the functionality could have been there) was the last straw. My next card will likely be one of the ASUS Xonar line --and I'll never touch a Creative card again. They bit the hand that feeds them one too many times.

Sounds like they're finally starting to listen.

that Vista is truely a downgrade!

...I might go creative next time then. The Xonar could be promising, but needs a better core and much quicker processing for its DirectSound3d wrapper.

I still use my old SB Live! Value r1 (the first, with no optical plugs at all). It's over a decade old, and at £60 one of the best investments in computer hardware I've ever made - it outclasses onboard sound cards to this day.

Why don't they just refund all the CC payments without asking the buyers to issue this?

This kind of action: charging a fee to build a drive it's OK, may be useful to Linux users(Just a thought).

i've got a dell box with an audigy card in it and had to pay a bit extra to get the ALchemy software, lets see if i get a little refund on the cost of my box now....

sorry got distracted by the pig flying past my office block

Does anyone remember having to pay for drivers, period? I still have an old 24-bit RasterOps card and recall that the company wanted to charge good money just for the drivers. This after you had already bought this very expensive card. By no means is this a new phenomenon.

Creative is well on its way with going the way of RasterOps- this PR fix is just to save some of their dignity.

"We've seen software developers charge money for updates that allow previously working apps to gain compatibility with either Vista or Mac OS X 10.5, forcing users to pay twice simply for having the temerity to upgrade their operating system.

By all means charge for new features, but to do so to simply allow a user to carry on using your product is, we think, the height of cheekiness."

So the user voluntarily changes operating systems from XP to Vista, which is a huge change in virtually all aspects. It is, quite literally, a brand new operating system. It's not "upgrading" your operating system; it's CHANGING your operating system. And you then expect a company (say, Creative Labs) to toil around trying to get its software to work with a brand new architecture (probably with little or no documentation from Microsoft), with no compensation? Anyone who thinks like that is, to use the word so favored lately by this website, a freetard. Would you also expect them to offer builds of their software for MacOS and Linux free of charge?

Yeah, let's blame software vendors and expect them to effectively build new products for free, simply because Microsoft is in the RIAA/MPAA's pockets and are forcing DRM onto everyone. And before you try to say "it's not about DRM", take a moment to think why Microsoft wants all audio data to go through the CPU -- it's all about the "protected pathway" the RIAA/MPAA wanted.

Oh well , one could say they did it to themselves , but it sounds like M$ Vista and Direct X10 have way too many bugs to be classified as a stable OS especially after a lot of after market common use software seems to require extensive surgery to run after SP1 !

Choices , or horses for courses , or could it be an impending class action law suit ?

Considering that Creative advertised the soundcards as Vista compatible they should not then charge users for required software for the purpose to use their card under the new operating systems with the same features as before. It would have been another matter if they had informed buyers that their cards were not Vista compatible... but they did not do that. So yes to charge people for functionality which is described on the box one more time after you bought the box is (politely speaking) at the height of cheekiness.

Shite products from a shite company with shite customer support who couldn't care one shite about their customers. I'm still waiting for a refund/replacements for soundcards killed by their EEPROM bug. It's been over 3 years now so I don't think it'll happen anytime soon.

Does anybody use Turtle Beach cards anymore?

Hi, I have been a computer reseller for 10 years and its always been that way, and it will always be that way. If you want to continue selling a card, a manufacturer should support it by law for 5 or 7 years. This includes drivers and repair services. After that period they can stop supporting it. I am so sick of companies still selling a product when Vista is out and not supporting it. By the way, first there was NT 4, then Windows 2000 which is NT 5.0, Windows XP is NT 5.5, and Vista is NT 6.0. Its the same OS just updated. Also Vista SP1 is working much better and Windows Server 2008 works fine. I have been fighting since Vista came out that software still for sale is not working properly under Vista... Its the take the money and run game...

Good Job By Daniel K. Shows many don't have much use for audiology though. Everyone wants best for their machine & Dr.K heLped lot.

Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.