Creative purposedly disabled features in their products

Remus

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Check up the whole brouhaha:

Further update: Daniel_K spoke to Wired magazine, and gave a detailed list of all the stuff Creative did to limit the functionality of their products, and his thoughts on the situation. For instance, you can basically update your Audigy cards to the functionality of and X-Fi cards by using his modded drivers. While the physical hardware is very similar across the different series of sound cards, it was the Creative drivers that said xxx function would, or would not, be activated.

"Creative purposedly modified the Audigy drivers to disable some features when Vista is detected and also purposedly introduced some bugs to prevent some XP utilities from running," Daniel_K says, in one part of his letter.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7826/

I really gotta thanks the guy that discover the dirty tricks played upon many Creative customers....
 
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That´s not really news. Creative has been doing this for many years. A new card every couple of years followed by several renamed driver updates, maybe with minor PCB tweaks.
 
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Creative pissed me off when they screwed me over my broken Zen. I still was somewhat loyal though on the sound card side, however my new PC has built in sound that seems to my half def ears to be as good as my Exitgy (I think that's what it's called, the external USB one).

So long Creative. See you in Chapter 11.
 
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There's nothing particularly dirty or evil about that -- it's just dumb that they did it in a way that's reversible by tweaking the drivers. Manufacturers do product positioning all the time; they nerf features on the lower-end stuff even though it would cost them nothing to put them in... other than lost sales in the higher-end, higher-margin stuff. I.e., a lot.
 
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I think the bigger issue is that they are trying to force people to buy new equipment when it will work perfectly well with the new operating system. But yes, companies do that all the time. Canon did it with the D10 and the Rebel Digital. A nice Russian hacker made it possible to get a D10 for the price of Rebel!
 
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creative makes great products
how'd you get hosed on your zen blatantninja?
while i'm only on my second zen, i'd never buy anything else again, and will go to my grave without an ipod tatooed on my soul.
 
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I'll never buy another one of Creative Labs' products. They abandoned support of the last sound card I bought from them, and that's enough for me.

Don't bother asking me to prove it either. I used to get satisfaction out of it and proved it over and over (including about a half dozen times to various folks at Creative Labs). Now I'm done proving it.

They're unethical, and that's all there is to it.
 
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creative makes great products
how'd you get hosed on your zen blatantninja?
while i'm only on my second zen, i'd never buy anything else again, and will go to my grave without an ipod tatooed on my soul.

I bought my Zen W last July. Used it until December when my screen got cracked in a freak accident. I sent it to them to repair, fully expecting to pay for it. I had to pay them $25 up front to look at it. Literally until they sent it back to me, their website said that I needed to resolve a payment issue before they'd look at it. I called, they assured me that the website was wrong and that it was in line to be looked at.

I sent it in on Dec 17th. January 17th, no update. Called to complain. Still in line they claim. February 17th, still no update. Called to complain, told it was being looked at. Finally end of February, still no update. Called to complain, talked to several managers who just couldn't seem to fathom why it was taking so long. Finally, at the end of February, after literally calling the CEO's office (got the handler of course) of Creative America, I get an email saying that it is broken beyond repair and what they can offer me is a replacement Zen W at the whopping discount of $50 off MSRP (Which was only about $20 less than I paid).

I call, tell them to send it back to me, complete with the technician's report of what exactly is wrong. They send it back, no report. I call up, they tell me they aren't obligated to provide that report, even though I paid for it and they didn't fix it.

I took it apart, found the screen online for $50 a piece, but unfortunately, you had to buy them in bulk. I called Creative and asked them to sell me just the screen. They wouldn't do it.

I went to Best Buy, purchased a new one, took it apart and connected the screen from the new one to my old one. It worked perfectly!!!!!!! I put the new one back together (with its screen, not the broken one), and took it back to Best Buy, telling them I didn't want it.

Called Creative, told them that I had tested it with a replacement screen and that it worked perfectly so they either needed to sell me a replacement screen or refund my $25. They refused. I'm now convinced that they just took my $25 and never bothered to look at it. I had to call me credit card company and dispute the charge to get it refunded.

Now don't get me wrong, I LOVED the unit. I just hate the company. The Zen W was absolutely great. My only complaint was the lack of MP4 compatibility. But I'm done with Creative. If I can ever get a replacement screen, I'll put mine back together and eBay it. I was so ticked, that I almost broke down and paid for that overpriced iPod Touch.

Instead, I bought an Archos 605. With $40 of plugins it plays everything I throw at it outside of DRM'd iTunes, which I refuse to buy anyway and it has better screen resolution. Plus, for another $100 I can use it as a DVR. And since I have DishNetwork, I can download SD shows directly to it. Took me a while to figure out all the functionality, but overall, I absolutely love it now.
 
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My first Zen has a problem with crackling noise but my second Zen I bought for $129 or $169 and it was 8gb. This was two Crhistmas' ago so Circuit City was being a loss leader. Its a great product, its only missing video capability.

But I bought the wife a real iPod because of after market support. I can find more after market junk for it and almost all car stereos have iPod capabilites built in. There's 100's of hacks for them too I'm finding out - it looks like MAME might be available for it.

The software for both companies is seriously annoying me though because its like those early pseudo-browser from companies like Realaudio or even Windows Media which would railroad yo onto their stores.

As for the specifics of this article I'm starting to really dislike Creative with their Sound Cards. I have an X-Fi and I'm not happy with its crackling and I'm very lucky that I got onto Vista late for them to fix all the problems with it. I guess part of the blame goes to DRM in Vista but Creative's focus as a company is probably the biggest culprit.

Let's just hope another company can become the soundcard standard. Where are Lotus 1-2-3, Epson, and even IBM today?
 
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I think the bigger issue is that they are trying to force people to buy new equipment when it will work perfectly well with the new operating system. But yes, companies do that all the time. Canon did it with the D10 and the Rebel Digital. A nice Russian hacker made it possible to get a D10 for the price of Rebel!

Well... sorta, but not really. Even when you un-nerfed the 300D, there were more differences between it and the 10D than there are between Canon's current corresponding models (the 40D and 450D). But yeah, it did annoy a lot of people.

(FWIW, I used to have a 10D, and my parents still cheerfully use their 300D, so I have a bit of experience with both cameras.)
 
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I still like my Zen, and have had no issues, but after hearing these horror stories, I'll be wary in future. If what happened to BN occurred here, we'd have it out on the current affairs shows giving them heaps of really BAD publicity. They'd be forced to spring for a new unit!!
 
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I thought about fighting them more on it, but I just couldn't be bothered as my English friends like to say!
 
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I love that sort of fight, cause in the end, THEY lose-one way or another!! :)
 
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Let's just hope another company can become the soundcard standard. Where are Lotus 1-2-3, Epson, and even IBM today?

For gaming, there aren't any. At least none I'm aware of. From my point of view, as far as sound standards go, the gaming industry took a serious step backwards since the dawn of Vista and the demise of Direct Sound 3D. Now everyone just implements basic software 3D sound without those realistic sounding hall effects, or whatever they want. At least with EAX there were useful, widespread standards.

As for the news.. in my opinion so called product placement should be forbidden in all industry sectors. The way it is, "you get what you pay for" seems to be a farce more often than not...
 
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Some printer manufacturers (notable Canon) disable their printers after a certain number of printings.
I think this is measured by the amount of ink used.

That's how I have this in my memory, so I'm not that surprised about Creative's behaviour.


The business model is really simple: Limit the low-end stuff in order to not cannibalize the higher priced stuff. No competition allowed.

In fact I believe that almost every company does this: Build the models rather identical, but limit the low-end, home-user models via drivers or even physically, so that there's still "need" or at least some attraction of the higher-priced products.

It's as simple as that.

It's a bit like companies reducing the amount of Yoghurt in their Yoghurt cups over the years meanwhile retaining the full price.

Besides, I recently built in my old SB16 sound card in my new PC again - only for the game port. :D My joystick still needs it. ;)
And of course I disabled the sound card completely. I only wanted the gameport. ;)

I've got an rare version of the SB16: Earlier versions came without the "wave table" daughterboard slot, but mine has it. But I never bought the add-on.
 
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