UNSOLVED
Soundblaster X-FI drivers - Need Action!
Guys,
I am extremely upset to see how infrequently Dell is releasing the X-Fi Drivers and we need to make them aware of this problem.
Unlike the video cards where we can go to ATI or Nvidia websites and download the latest drivers, we cannot go to Creative Labs website and download the latest driver.
This is because our X-FI soundcards are OEM versions and are flashed in a way that will only work with Dell owns drivers.
However Dell doesn't give a darn about updating the drivers, despite some serious EAX/OpenAL problems with the sound drivers that lead to data loss and a blue screen in Windows. I have done many days of research to figure out the exact problem that can be found
here,
here and
here.
The good news is that the problem is already solved on
5th November in the official release:
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi series Vista Driver 2.15.0004
that fixes:
- Resolves an issue for Windows Vista 64-bit systems with 4 GB RAM
- Resolves loud speaker noise when restarting your computer
- Resolves an issue that causes OpenAL games not to respond
-
However the latest version of Dell's drivers are from
16th October fixes only
- Update Driver to fix the startup noise problem on Vista 64 system that has more than 4G RAM.
Obviously the latest fix from Creative Labs was not even finished when Dell released their version.
Three months have passed now and we still haven't got any new driver release from Dell to support the latest problems.
I am not asking for super features here but a driver that works as they have advertised their Rig. We should make Dell aware of this issue. You can help by sending your comments here as a form of complaint. I hope if this gets enough attention and Chris would kindly forward this to Dell, something might happen.
Please take action!
Regards,
Houman
