Creative Drivers, Vista, and God

Thus far, the Creative Labs Vista Audigy drivers have been pretty crap. I frequently get bursts of static over any audio, and only a reboot of my Media Center will fix it. But they’re betas: I can cut them some slack.

Yesterday, up popped a nice dialog box stating that my drivers would expire tomorrow, and that I could uninstall them. I didn’t see the popup until today, because it popped up behind Media Center. How handy.

Faced with a choice of a) downloading a new set of drivers, or b) running my Media Center without sound, I opted for option A.

Or, I’d like to opt for option A. Creative’s US support site is currently telling me that it “Can’t locate any sites with current domain/port credentials”, and the European support site can’t be found. It would appear that “dev1-eusite.cle.creaf.com.creative.com/support/downloads” isn’t online.

Interestingly, if I pick “Vatican City” as my location, I can work my way through a set of Italian pages and locate a new driver. Hopefully it’ll be in English.

I can’t help but imagine the Pope, tutting infallibly to himself as his Media Center pops up a message about the expiration of his sound drivers, but content in the knowledge that, it’s ok, he can download a new set of drivers from Creative. It really is all about who you know, isn’t it?

Fingers crossed: hopefully [these drivers](http://files2.europe.creative.com/m anualdn/Drivers/AVP/9988/0xD6D47C80/SBAX_PCDVTBETA_US_2_12_0001.exe) will be in English, fix my static problem, and make the Pope a very happy man.