Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: CP5670 on May 19, 2006, 11:51:27 am
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I upgraded my XP install to SP2 a few days ago and the memory commit charge has increased dramatically. It used to be around 80MB before on a clean boot, but it shot up to 170MB after the upgrade. :eek: I disabled some of the extra services and brought it down to about 140MB, but that's still much more than it was before. Is there some big service or something I'm missing, or is SP2 just inherently bloatware compared to SP1?
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is SP2 just inherently bloatware compared to SP1?
Yes.
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Commit charge is pagefile, so don't worry about it, worry about available physical memory instead. I have 1GB RAM installed and I booted my system over 3 hours ago and have 650MB free RAM. Pagefile (commit charge) usage is little less than 300MB.
In any case, I generally recommend only two ways to install a service pack;
1) Clean install of Windows and then install service pack next, before any other drivers and software.
2) The most recommended way, integrate SP2 with your Windows installation media, also called as slipstream (http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp).
Installing SP2 on top of non-clean Windows installation is like installing XP again on top of old installation, this is because SP2 is a big upgrade to XP.
worry about available physical memory instead
And this by the way no longer holds true with starting with Vista, this is because Vista is adopting a new memory management similar to unix and linux. The keyphrase there is "unused RAM is wasted RAM", so instead of trying to get as much free RAM as possible it is more important to use available RAM effectively.
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Where can I find the physical memory usage? Anyway, there are more and larger svchost processes than before, but I can't think of what they would contain since the services I am running aren't much different from what I used to have.
I just used the "SP2 for IT professionals" download, as I didn't have time to reinstall XP from scratch. The only reason I installed it was that the MS dual core hotfix wouldn't work with SP1.
I guess this is not a big problem; it's just that I like to have my system as clean as possible. :p
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I said it before and I will say it again: SP2 sucks. :p
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Where can I find the physical memory usage?
Task manager, the same tab where you looked commit charge up from.
I said it before and I will say it again: SP2 sucks. :p
SP2 is a great upgrade to XP from support technician's point of view even if end users don't know to appreciate it.
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It's not totally the support technician's savior considering that it does have a nasty tendency to frak up your windows install once in a while.
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SP2 is a damned lot better than Vanilla/SP1 XP, but you can't install it on an existing SP1 or vanilla system, esp. if that system has had patches and extra drivers installed, because more often than not it breaks it :hopping:
Fury has got part about it totally correct.
How many of you are using XP out of curiosity? :p
I'm tri-booting Win98SE, Win2k and Gentoo at the moment :)
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Am I one of the only ones who updated XP to SP1, then to SP2 - without any incident at all? Everything works and has been working for a long long time.
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It's not totally the support technician's savior considering that it does have a nasty tendency to frak up your windows install once in a while.
While I am not aware of every possible hardware and software combination that might play a role in SP2 incompatibility, chances are pretty good that it would happen regardless of whether SP2 is installed or not. Should that not be the case, the first step in solving the problem would be to update motherboard BIOS. That's all I can say with nonexistent details about the problem, but I've got a hunch you don't want to solve it and would like to blame SP2 instead. :p
Am I one of the only ones who updated XP to SP1, then to SP2 - without any incident at all? Everything works and has been working for a long long time.
No you are not, there are still many factors in the play when you do it and chances that something goes wrong is multiplied when you install SP2 on non-clean XP installation.
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Should that not be the case, the first step in solving the problem would be to update motherboard BIOS.....
And your hunch would be flat wrong. Since I have a laptop, driver updates from the manufacturer seldom come out. One of the issues I have with SP2 was that now, suddenly, the internal drive won't read CD-R's anymore (no matter what is on it), only retail CD's (like game discs that I may have bought in the past, etc). Thankfully I have an external CD burner, so I have to pull it out whenever I want to see what is on a disk.
No you are not, there are still many factors in the play when you do it and chances that something goes wrong is multiplied when you install SP2 on non-clean XP installation.
Which is why I believe it was poorly designed. Not all of us have a free completly day to backup everything, reformat, install windows and SP2, then reload everything. But what if you are a network administrator who would need to backup, reformat and re-install everything in order to make the update work properly on 20+ computers?
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Windows Service Packs are like repackaged OS's, making them able to be slipstreamed into Gold install sources. It's not poorly designed, it's just the nature of the beast. This OS is not nearly as modular as Linux is. Apparently, all you have to do for Linux is recompile the kernel, or whatever ya do you Linux gurus do, and you have an OS upgrade. Since Windows is not designed that way, this is the best way to apply huge OS updates, without forcing people to reformat. Anyone with a gold or SP1 install can slipstream SP2 and have a super-reliable way to install Windows with thier most up to date service pack. Of course, you still have to download the 46 or so required updates to be fully updated, and even then, you'll have to pick and choose certain updates because some may not work right in your environment.
Slipstream, or you're just begging for trouble.
BTW, I AM a network tech who backed up over thirty systems and reinstalled SP1, then installed SP2 over the top of it, this spring. It took me two days to do it, backing up the hard drive data with Ghost, partitioning with Partition Magic, and installing XPSP1 onto the machines again. I've been able to get away fairly clean if the very first thing you do after your first clean boot, is to run SP2, without installing ANY drivers at all. After SP2 is installed, THEN do your updates and such. After the install, everything was re-backed up to have a clean image, so I don't have to go through the installation process again. No big problems here. Of course these computers really only run one or two programs, integral to the business. They won't be used as heavily as I would use my machine.
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Nix pretty much hit the bullseye with his explanation, thankfully MS has learned something from this and supposedly taken modular approach with Windows Vista. It remains to be seen how succesful they have been once the first SP comes out for Vista.
And your hunch would be flat wrong. Since I have a laptop, driver updates from the manufacturer seldom come out. One of the issues I have with SP2 was that now, suddenly, the internal drive won't read CD-R's anymore (no matter what is on it), only retail CD's (like game discs that I may have bought in the past, etc).
It does not really matter how often a manufacturer releases BIOS and driver updates as long as you at least use the latest BIOS and drivers. However, your problem is quite common and is usually caused by one of the following reasons, note "usually".
- A bug in the drive's firmware, should be updated if any updates are available.
- A software that uses the drive's burning features is not fully compatible with SP2 (assuming it does NOT happen with SP1), update any such software or replace it if it does not have any post-SP2 updates.
- The drive is failing.
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The only way to see if Kosh's SP2 debacle is true, is to revert to SP1 and see if it stops working. It's quite easy to blame a software upgrade to cause devices to stop working properly, when in all actuality, it probably failed near the same time the software upgrade was applied. I, for example, blamed DARC when they came out with Divx 6, causing it to make my audio cut out whenever I tried to play back any video in any video player. Turns out, it was Driver Cleaner 1.3 deleting a little more than it should have, when I did a driver upgrade at the same exact time as my Divx 6 install, which was the author's fault there with that version.
But if it reads stamped CD's, but not burned CD's, it's probably a drive failure. My old Yamaha drive did that same exact thing, stopped reading burned CD's, but still could limp through stamped discs. since your removable drive works, I highly doubt that it's SP2 causing your drive to fail. I mean, come on, Windows still uses the same I/O and internal operations to read your removable drive, as it does to read your internal drive. If SP2 broke your CDrom access, it'd probably do the same exact thing to every single drive you'd hook up to the machine, which would mean that either 1, your laptop has issues with SP2 as a whole, or 2, something has become corrupted in the OS and a reinstall is necessary at this point.
It's just plain silly to blame M$ and thier service packs causing so much trouble, when really, it's a simple and effective process IF DONE CORRECTLY. Windows is NOT Linux, so don't expect it to operate the same. And dont jump up and down and say "IT SHOULD BE LIKE LINUX DANGIT!" M$ had the right to make the OS as they saw fit, and yes, comparing it to other OS's, it's not as well designed, but you have to apply the updates correctly to see the full benefits, and stability that the new pack offers over older packs. Of course, there's no one correct way to apply updates, but as stated by Fury and I, slipstreaming is probably your best way to get this done. It's just so much easier to bash a big corporation and blame them for your problems. Oh well.
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Sp2 works great, sure it complains about me not using windows update (which i refuse to use, if it ain't broke, don't fix it) as it stands, it's always best to install SP2 on a clean install, it's too much of a nightmare to install it over an install that's been running for a while..
either way, i've had this install running since i got my new Mobo, and that was something over a couple of years ago. So far, not one BSOD, hangup, etc.
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never had any problems with my sp2 either.
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I upgraded my XP install to SP2 a few days ago and the memory commit charge has increased dramatically. It used to be around 80MB before on a clean boot, but it shot up to 170MB after the upgrade. :eek: I disabled some of the extra services and brought it down to about 140MB, but that's still much more than it was before. Is there some big service or something I'm missing, or is SP2 just inherently bloatware compared to SP1?
I've gotten my SP2 install down to about 140 commit charge on startup. After that its upto about 300 with a few programs running. My co-worker has his down to 90 commit charge on startup. SP2 adds a few extra features (security center for one) that SP1 didn't have so commit charge will be higher. With 1GB of RAM its a drop in the bucket.
And yes...never had a problem with SP2...ever. People are all so worried about it but its the best service pack and edition of WinXP to run.
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So, the drive would fail at EXACTLY the same time I install SP2? That's a hell of a co-incidence. I'll try rolling it back later, but I heard that also fraks it up so I need to back up everything. It will be a little while before I have some time to do that.
And BTW, I've never slepstreamed a SP install, and I have installed them on various machines, and WinXP SP2 was the only one to EVER give me problems.
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So, the drive would fail at EXACTLY the same time I install SP2? That's a hell of a co-incidence. I'll try rolling it back later, but I heard that also fraks it up so I need to back up everything. It will be a little while before I have some time to do that.
And BTW, I've never slepstreamed a SP install, and I have installed them on various machines, and WinXP SP2 was the only one to EVER give me problems.
Sounds like the laser in your device is either out of alignment or too weak to read from the burned disks. The best way to test is is to try several different brands of CD-R and see if it can read them. If it can read some then thats probably indicative of the problem. The other thing to do is pop in your Windows install CD, boot to a command prompt with CD-Drivers enabled and see if you can read from burned disks. If the problem is the OS and not the drive then you'll very quickly see what the issue is. Then you can troubleshoot the correct item.
Upgrading to SP2 may have toasted a driver in your case (its rare in my experience) but its unlikely to damage hardware. If the hardware was already failing it may have just exposed a problem rather than created one.
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I am running into an annoying problem with SP2. I use a variation (different colors) of the Windows classic theme, but whenever I restart it keeps reverting to the standard XP theme and I have to set it back manually. This never occurred in SP1. Is there any way to prevent this?
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One customer contacted our tech support about similar problem not too long ago, never heard of similar happening before. I couldn't find any clues back then, but I guess it happens because your user profile gets somehow corrupted or XP cannot overwrite old settings. Try create a new user account and test if it happens with new account as well, if it doesn't, use new account instead of old one and delete old account.
Don't forget to check old user's my document's folder for any stuff that should be moved to new account.
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If someone wanted more info/help, they might try these forums. (Since http://www.autopatcher.com/ is still under construction.)
Autopatcher:
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=89
Autostreamer:
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562
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One customer contacted our tech support about similar problem not too long ago, never heard of similar happening before. I couldn't find any clues back then, but I guess it happens because your user profile gets somehow corrupted or XP cannot overwrite old settings. Try create a new user account and test if it happens with new account as well, if it doesn't, use new account instead of old one and delete old account.
Don't forget to check old user's my document's folder for any stuff that should be moved to new account.
Thanks, I'll give that a try. It does seem to be some issue with the user accounts, as I put SP2 on my other machine and the problem doesn't occur there.
The setting that's not getting saved (or possibly getting overwritten by the login account settings) appears to be the "windows and buttons" thing in the display properties appearances tab. Do you happen to know where the values for these things are stored in the registry?
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Well, I got that problem fixed by just disabling the themes service. That works out nicely; the less services running, the better.
On a side note, I unfortunately made a huge error with something else I did: I decided to update the Creative sound card drivers. The update not only didn't work, but it messed up something really badly. I can't reinstall the original driver, and I still have no sound working despite struggling with this for the last two hours. If I try to install the driver (the original one on the CD) manually through the device manager, it fails and just gives the error "The data is invalid." Do any of you know what that means?
Man, I really wish I had stayed away from that stupid update. Everything was working fine before.
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Okay, I have concluded that either SP2, the Audigy drivers or both were written by monkeys. I got fed up with trying the various fixes I was finding on obscure internet forums and decided to try uninstalling SP2 as a last resort, and the drivers then installed perfectly. :rolleyes: I still don't have everything working correctly - the control panel and utilities won't load up, so I can't use the reverb effects I normally have on - but the drivers themselves now work and I am getting sound again. I might give the updated drivers another try and see if I can get the utilities working again.
The dual core hotfix no longer works, but that might actually be a good thing. It seems that the Unreal-based games that were previously having dual core related problems with that installed now suddenly work fine. Some "hotfix" that is. :p
I used to think all the complaints about SP2 were blown out of proportion, but the chances of me reinstalling that piece of crap on my main system are about as high as those of FS3 coming out.
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One word; slipstream.
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Just bite the bullet and reinstall your OS. That's the ONLY way to see SP2 in it's PROPER state. Like we've both said, installing it over an installation that already has it's own little quirks, is going to give you dissapointing results. Do not write it off untill you do a slipstream, Things will be better.
Also, remember when I posted about the new X-Fi cards coming out? Nearly EVERYONE who still uses an Audigy 1 will have problems with SP2 and drivers. The driver set created by Creative Labs plain sucks. You'll have to install the drivers manually, meaning before your install program closes, go rooting through the temp directory and pull the extracted driver files away from the temp folder, then run the CTZAPXX app in one of the folders there, and choose Driver Installation. Reboot, and use CTPanel to control the card from there. If you get fed up, consider getting an X-Fi, the basic model, as it's much better than the audgy 1, 2, whatever card before it, the X-Fi is much better. The drivers are much better than the Audigy drivers as well, I believe there's been a few updates, and they all work fine.
@ Kosh
If you're absolutely convinced that your drive is dead, then get a livecd image of a various linux distro and boot into it using the faulty drive. That'll definetly put your drive through it's paces and should tell you if the drive is failing. If you can't boot from a burned CD, then your drive is failing. And, no, SP2 will not cause your optical drive to just go belly up, it could be anything. Age, faulty components, or just plain being used till it's wore out. If the drive is a combo drive, it'll go out way faster than a normal CD reader drive. I have an old mitsumi 4X that eats discs due to a goofed up retainer, but it still runs and reads. Every single combo or DVD drive I've owned except for the two in my case right now has died in the past.
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Not all is well in the X-Fi land either. (http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&message.id=61926)
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Funny.. A lot of people have had problems with the Audigy cards on Via chipsets, which is what I have, and had mega uber problems with my Audigy 1. Using the same chipset, I've had absolutely no problems with popping or crackling on my system. The only thing that hasn't worked properly for me was the game Savage. It would not play back the sound effects, just the boring music. But yeah, I'll have to spend some time out and read this behemoth. Nice find.
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Just bite the bullet and reinstall your OS. That's the ONLY way to see SP2 in it's PROPER state. Like we've both said, installing it over an installation that already has it's own little quirks, is going to give you dissapointing results. Do not write it off untill you do a slipstream, Things will be better.
Also, remember when I posted about the new X-Fi cards coming out? Nearly EVERYONE who still uses an Audigy 1 will have problems with SP2 and drivers. The driver set created by Creative Labs plain sucks. You'll have to install the drivers manually, meaning before your install program closes, go rooting through the temp directory and pull the extracted driver files away from the temp folder, then run the CTZAPXX app in one of the folders there, and choose Driver Installation. Reboot, and use CTPanel to control the card from there. If you get fed up, consider getting an X-Fi, the basic model, as it's much better than the audgy 1, 2, whatever card before it, the X-Fi is much better. The drivers are much better than the Audigy drivers as well, I believe there's been a few updates, and they all work fine.
Well, from what you're saying it looks like the Audigy 2 drivers are the source of the problem. The thing is that they pretty much worked fine with SP2 before I got the updated ones, so the problem seems to be with the installer. The only reason I got the update was that BF2 was causing some weird problems with the global audio effects, and I read somewhere that the update fixes that.
I was actually planning to buy an xtrememusic card in a few days, but I'll have to think long and hard about that now. It's obvious that Creative can't write drivers worth ****. Maybe I'll pick it up at the local Best Buy tomorrow and give it a try anyway, and just return it if it doesn't work. Do the X-fi drivers install AOL ads on your system like the Audigy 2 ones? :rolleyes:
I might have to reinstall XP anyway at this point, so I guess I might as well try it again, as the dual core hotfix seems to be needed for some other games. I suppose it would give me a reason to move off this old hard drive to the newer one I got anyway.
By the way, I have heard of some third party drivers called the KX drivers. Are those a viable alternative to the Creative set?
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Audigy 2 ZS has worked for me perfectly with XP SP2, but I have NEVER installed the original Audigy 2 drivers from the installation media. After you have reinstalled XP, download the latest Audigy 2 drivers from Creative's site and install those, don't even bother installing anything from the discs that came with the card. I have never seen any AOL ads on my computer, just install the drivers from Creative's site and forget the installation media.
kX drivers does not support EAX, and since the last official kX driver release was early 2004, I don't see these drivers as a viable option for gamers.
And before you reinstall XP, please do slipstream. Countless of guides out there, if you don't fancy the guide I linked in previous thread page, google for "Windows XP Service Pack 2 slipstream" and you'll find more.
And really, you should never install any drivers or software from the discs that comes with the hardware but instead download and install the latest versions of drivers available from the manufacturer. There are a few exceptions to this golden rule, like a certain software not being available for download but is on a disc. But anyway, always install the latest drivers available from hardware manufacturer. Installing old drivers and then updating these drivers is a bad choice and may cause problems, especially with ****ty drivers such as Sound Blaster drivers. And later it is always for the best to uninstall current drivers for before updating, this most likely saves you a bit of trouble in the long run.
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I generally do that, but the CD drivers were the latest ones back when I bought the card, and I hadn't bothered to update them until now. I'm actually wishing I had just ignored the drivers on the Creative site, which are what started all the problems.
I'll try the slipstream thing this time, but I want to make sure that it will actually work. From my experience, the Audigy 2 driver installer works okay with SP1 but hates SP2, so if I'm going to stay with this card it might be better to install SP1, then the drivers, and then the SP2 update. Although I have just about had enough of these drivers and will probably give that X-fi a try instead, as I was going to buy that soon anyway.
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Like I said, I haven't had the slightest problem with installing the latest Audigy 2 ZS drivers from Creative on SP2. Don't install SP2 on top of vanilla XP or XP SP1 if you have the choice of using a slipstream.
And you might want to read the link about X-Fi's I posted earlier. (My second post on this page)
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Yeah, I've heard of that crackling problem and it sounds pretty bad. That being said, I have also seen widespread complaints about a somewhat similar problem with the Audigy 2 (the squeal of death), but I've never run into that myself. These cards really seem to be hit or miss, but if I buy it from a B&M store and it doesn't work, I can return it easily. From what I'm reading this card seems to have better driver support than the Audigy 2, which alone might make it worth the upgrade. Even before all this, a number of EAX enabled games were resetting the options for the global environmental effects with the Audigy 2, and I'm getting rather tired of that now.
Are there any alternatives to Creative that work well for games? I've seen people recommending M-Audio cards, but those seem to be geared towards audio professionals rather than gamers.
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For gamers there really aren't alternatives. However, I'd still recommend you to try your Audigy 2 with latest drivers after you have reinstalled XP, you might be surprised positively and want to hold off with that X-Fi upgrade.
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Everything seems to be working fine now. I decided to get an x-fi, especially as I needed some sound card (the Audigy 2) for my other computer anyway. I made a slipstreamed SP2 CD and just put it on top of my existing SP1 install, and I haven't run into any problems this time. If I still have issues I can do a clean install, but for now it looks like I can avoid that hassle.
The x-fi is actually better than I expected. The control panel is much more clean and resource-efficient than the Audigy one, and games and music (particularly midis) both exhibit subtle but noticeable improvements over the Audigy 2. The extreme highs and lows especially sound quite a bit clearer, and several games sound better just because EAX is actually working correctly in them now.
That being said, it seems that the Audigy 2 had a lot more of the global EAX environmental effects and options for customizing them. I might just be looking in the wrong place though.
Nix, do you happen to know if there is any way to get reverb on midis on these cards? My old Live 5.1 can do this but only in 98/ME, while the Audigy 2 can't do it at all.
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Reverb on midis, I don't know if it can be done or not. I remember using my old Audigy, there was an EAX panel or something, that allowed you to select an input, apply reverb/echo/EAXpreset to it, then save the settings to a preset file. Unfortunately, I dont think the X-Fi has that. Try looking in the Soundfont manager, and/or in the 3D Midi player. I think you can add effects there, and it *might* be able to apply your changes globally, so you wont have to use thier goofy looking software.
I've had no problems on my system, and I think it's a great card. I think the popping/crackling problems happen mainly on Nforce4 boards, instead of the VIA boards, which is what I have. I've had mine since January, so I'm thinking if it doesnt start going out anytime soon, it'll last for quite a while. My Audigy 1 still works fine, but the drivers provided for it on XP are terrible. 98's drivers are a lot better, as this card was released back when 98 was still the hot home OS to use... Oh well.
BTW, if you do get a pair of DT-770's, you should notice a difference between cards. The X-Fi is quieter than the Audigy, background noise wise. No strange hissing or humming.
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My Audigy 1 still works fine, but the drivers provided for it on XP are terrible.
If it did everything right with no issues, it wouldn't be a Creative driver.
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The only problem I've ever had with my Live! card drivers was a tendancy for speaker layout options to go missing, requiring a reinstall. This problem seems to have stopped, though, because the last reinstall was around December and everything's still fine.
Of course, this could have something to do with the system spending less than a third of its uptime in Windows since I got Gentoo working.
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My Audigy 1 still works fine, but the drivers provided for it on XP are terrible.
If it did everything right with no issues, it wouldn't be a Creative driver.
That is sooo true :(
It all started after they bought Ensoniq and made PCI cards. ALL their PCI cards suck - They follow PCI specs very loosely, which is why they always seem to have trouble cropping up.
With chipsets which are designed to be very relaxed, e.g. Intel, they tend to be okay, but stuff that strictly follows PCI specs always has trouble.
And Creative cannot write drivers for ****.
I had been hoping they would pull and ATI and start making decent drivers, but nope. They are still like the Rage128 era ATI.
I'm just bitter Gravis and Aureal went out of business, because as others have said, there are NO alternatives now :(
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I'm just bitter Gravis and Aureal went out of business, because as others have said, there are NO alternatives now :(
There's still a loose hope that nVidia might try to enter Creative's turf with a successor of SoundStorm. I wish they'd do that, soon.
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What happened to Gravis and Aureal? I almost never hear of these companies, except when I am trying to configure a DOS game.....
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I don't know much of Gravis' history, I think the company just couldn't compete, besides sound cards Gravis also manufactured gaming peripherals. Aureal was bought by Creative.
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I'm another one that had problems w/ the Creative web drivers on my Live! 5.1 : in two words - DOESN'T WORK. Okay, two words and a contraction. I finally got them to work and pretty much just hope I never have to re-install XP, as the stupid drivers will just say "no Creative hardware detected" and close. I forget how I got it working. Anyways, I was going to ask if there were any really nice soundcards out there that have the features of Creative w/out the stinking bugs... I guess not, huh?
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I remember that problem when I still had my Live! Value card, they still have not fixed it? Anyway, the solution is to install drivers manually for the card through device manager, reboot and run the setup which will then install rest of the drivers such as SB16 emulation driver.
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I'll have to try that next time XP crashes on me & I have to re-install... although, it may be that that is what I ended up doing anyways... but thanks, this way I won't have to find out all over again.
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Reverb on midis, I don't know if it can be done or not. I remember using my old Audigy, there was an EAX panel or something, that allowed you to select an input, apply reverb/echo/EAXpreset to it, then save the settings to a preset file. Unfortunately, I dont think the X-Fi has that. Try looking in the Soundfont manager, and/or in the 3D Midi player. I think you can add effects there, and it *might* be able to apply your changes globally, so you wont have to use thier goofy looking software.
I've had no problems on my system, and I think it's a great card. I think the popping/crackling problems happen mainly on Nforce4 boards, instead of the VIA boards, which is what I have. I've had mine since January, so I'm thinking if it doesnt start going out anytime soon, it'll last for quite a while. My Audigy 1 still works fine, but the drivers provided for it on XP are terrible. 98's drivers are a lot better, as this card was released back when 98 was still the hot home OS to use... Oh well.
BTW, if you do get a pair of DT-770's, you should notice a difference between cards. The X-Fi is quieter than the Audigy, background noise wise. No strange hissing or humming.
I searched around a bit and it looks a lot of people are complaining about the same thing on the Creative forums; the reverb is there but it's highly muted and hard to make out at even the highest settings. Creative, as usual, is apparently ignoring the problem.
I haven't run into any of the crackling problems with the X-fi and I have an nforce4 board.
The Audigy 2 installed without any problems on my other machine, but I have SP1 on there. The trend with Creative seems to be that their cards work great on the current Windows version at the time of their release, but trying to get them to work on any subsequent version is a total crap shoot. I hope this card will be compatible with Vista, but I think that might be too much to expect from Creative. :p
As for the hissing and whining effects, I used to get that on the Audigy 2 that if I used the front audio ports on my case (connected to the white J1 port on the card) instead of the ones on the card itself, and seemingly also if I used an Asus motherboard. When I switched boards and started using the rear ports, these weird background noises went away.
The general sound quality seems to differ mainly with very low and very high frequency sounds. The Audigy 2 sounded a bit distorted to me with some types of loud, bassy noises in music (on a DT250), but the X-fi has no such problems.
I'm another one that had problems w/ the Creative web drivers on my Live! 5.1 : in two words - DOESN'T WORK. Okay, two words and a contraction. I finally got them to work and pretty much just hope I never have to re-install XP, as the stupid drivers will just say "no Creative hardware detected" and close. I forget how I got it working. Anyways, I was going to ask if there were any really nice soundcards out there that have the features of Creative w/out the stinking bugs... I guess not, huh?
heh, the Live 5.1 drivers in XP are simply horrendous. They half worked for me a few years ago, but whenever I played any EAX enabled game, it completely broke the audio output and I had to totally remove and then reinstall the drivers to get any sound back. This procedure had become almost a daily ritual for me at one point, as it took me a long time to isolate all the games that were causing problems and fully disable any EAX in them.
There are no such problems with the 98/ME drivers, however. I have this card in my old game computer (which runs ME) for its SB16 emulation, which works great on old motherboards. It also supports reverb on midis.
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My Audigy 1 still works fine, but the drivers provided for it on XP are terrible.
If it did everything right with no issues, it wouldn't be a Creative driver.
We need a fan-modded driver set like the Omega drivers for ATI users, as an alternative. I just think that Creative is totally anal about giving out thier software for people to modify. If they'd release beta sets to the public, and allow people to modify that code, at least there'd be an alternative to use rather than the only one available driver from Creative that may or may not work. For me, the X-Fi drivers are good enough to do anything I do audio wise. Digging through the behemoth thread over at creative, apparently most of the time being spent on driver creation has been put into creating X-Fi drivers for Vista, so it will have full "compatibility" when it comes out. So there might be hope for Vista and the X-Fi. I'm sure that Microsoft will have Microsoft-provided drivers for the Audigy or 10K series chipsets built-in to the OS, and I'm sure that at this point I'd rather use those than any provided from Creative. Yes, that's how bad I think thier drivers really are, because I'm an anti-microsoft-driver guy, but Creative can't support anything worth a damn..
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We need a fan-modded driver set like the Omega drivers for ATI users, as an alternative.
There is such a project, the kX project.
http://www.driverheaven.net/forumdisplay.php?f=67
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/
No EAX or X-Fi support though.
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My desktop has a live card. If you don't install the Creative drivers first, then they will give you big problems (like random BSOD's).
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:wtf: :wtf: :wtf: :wtf:
Am I the only one who hasn't had a system crippled by the SB Live! 5.1?
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You're not, if it was a Windows 98 system. The only reason why I was using an Audigy in the first place is that the card's left output mysteriously died, and I couldn't fix it. It's still sitting in a box somewhere. I LOVED the SB LIVE! card that I had. I think it was the original 256 version, which could be bumped up to 512K by a driver update. I dunno about that, but I thought it was a pretty nice card for its time.
Though.. the A3D cards which were out around the time of the Live was, had better, much much better virtual sound features than EAX at the time. EAX still drives me nuts unless it's applied correctly...
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Windows XP. 98SE has its own problems on this machine.
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I don't know much of Gravis' history, I think the company just couldn't compete, besides sound cards Gravis also manufactured gaming peripherals. Aureal was bought by Creative.
What happened to Gravis and Aureal? I almost never hear of these companies, except when I am trying to configure a DOS game.....
Well, Gravis were at their peak during the DOS days - Back then, 'tho, we didn't have things like DirectX, so if you wanted to play a DOS game with sound that didn't come from the 'PC Bleeper', it pretty much HAD to have SoundBlaster compatibility.
The Gravis Ultrasounds didn't, and used a really ****ty emulation module which worked with almost nothing. Bit like the emulation Creative bundle with their older PCI sound cards now ;)
However, because the GUS was so awesome (It had multi-channel hardware mixing; The first consumer card I know of that had it!) they actually managed to get a fair bit of support. The Demoscene espescially loved the GUS; Almost all of the later 1990+ DOS demos had GUS support in some form.
But support was really what killed them, esp. when Creative released the AWE-32 (Also a very good card).
If Gravis had managed to survive to the Win95/DirectX era they would have been okay because driver support wouldn't have mattered, but they screwed themselves over and died before it came to pass :(
I had both the AWE and the GUS, but unfortunately they were both PnP which meant they were complete BASTARDS to get working together unless you hacked your own BIOS' PnP tables or could figure out how to force each card to assign itself a certain IRQ!
The Aureal Vortex2 was a legendary sound card chipset back in the day - It implemented HRTF (basically 3D sound simulation) years before Creative did, and the A3D2.0 API it used destroys EAX.
EAX is basically a set of parameters a game sends to the card to set Reverb. etc. at different levels - Very simplistic.
A3D2 took the actual 3D gemoetry and calculated reverb, reflections etc. from the scene!
I bought the SB Live! Platinum 5.1 I have now about the same time my friend got his Diamond Multimedia MX300 (It was quite weird actually because he also had a Video card (A 12MB Voodoo2) from Creative - At the time, this was a bit surreal because Creative had ALWAYS been the de facto sound card company and Diamond had always been the de facto video card company!! :lol: ).
We'd both gotten Half-Life 1 recently, and I gotta say, the difference was staggering.
With EAX, it isn't that much different from the software reverb HL uses if you turn off EAX - Going from a echoy pipe to an out door area will instantly change the reverb at the transition point; Pretty unnatural.
With the A3D2 it transitions the way you'd imagine it would for real.
It's hard to describe... The sound 'sounded' good in EAX, but 'felt' awesome on the A3D.
The only downside with the Vortex2 was DOS support - Basically it didn't have any worth talking about.
I never understood why they died; I blame it on Creative's inertia (They are like the Microsoft of the Soundcard world; They make half-assed buggy pieces of crap, but everybody still uses them so they are a semi-standard.)
Oddly, despite buying them out, Creative don't appear to have used much of the tech they would have gotten from A3D. I suspect it's because they were/are too thick to understand the code ;)
I'm just bitter Gravis and Aureal went out of business, because as others have said, there are NO alternatives now :(
There's still a loose hope that nVidia might try to enter Creative's turf with a successor of SoundStorm. I wish they'd do that, soon.
I hope so! The SoundStorm was a pretty good chipset - IMHO not as good in hardware as the latest Creative silicon at the time, but nVidia can a) Write drivers properly and b) QA Test their products properly, both things which Creative have never been able to do.
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Last week I troubled myself to send email to nVidia regarding the future of Soundstorm. Here's what I got back.
Thank you for your email. While the NVIDIA Soundstorm APU received a tremendous fan base for delivering the first consumer dolby digital encoding solution to the desktop consumer market, unfortunately our motherboard manufacturing partners were not very interested at the time due to the higher costs it added to the motherboards. NVIDIA has not plans to enter the descrete sound card add-on market so there are no plans to release another version of Soundstorm in the nearby future. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause. C-Media provides an alternative with their CMI8768+ chip. Please look for sound cards from their add-in board partners featuring this chip for dolby digital encoding solutions for your PC.
So no new SoundStorm this year at the very least, maybe some day... In the meantive C-Media probably provides the best alternative chips, like the CMI8768+ mentioned in the quote. Other decent chips are CMI8770 and CMI8788. Probably the most famous sound card with one of these three C-Media chips is the HDA X-Plosion 7.1.
http://www.google.com/search?q=hda+x-plosion+7.1+review
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Windows XP SP1 and SP1a support ends on October 10, 2006 (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean19)