… and Vote.

 

Apparently, some kind soul has nominated my blog to the Let It Out campaign run by Kleenex. You can even vote for my blog, should you feel particularly kindly disposed to do so. I feel rather like Groucho Marx, who famously said that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member… However, I have no shame. So vote for me…

Last month, I mentioned in Do I Need Windows Vista? that a number of my hardware devices would either never have software drivers for Vista, or that the manufacturers were still working on them. Six weeks later, what’s the current situation?

 

My soundcards – I have two, one is a Creative Technology Audigy 2, the other is an E-MU 1820M professional audio and MIDI interface. Currently, the Audigy sort of works – it can handle stereo playback, but the 5.1 surround sound capability continues not to function, and the Creative control panel application falls over on a continual basis. Last month, Creative only had Beta drivers released for Vista, but now their "final" drivers have been released (version 2.12.0002), with no discernable improvement whatsoever that I can see. I wrote last month that Creative’s customer discussion forum for Vista issues was glowing white-hot, being filled with angry comments from dissatisfied customers. It’s currently rapidly heading towards total meltdown as far as I can see. Really, Creative’s software quality is a total joke, and judging from the reactions of the forum moderators, they clearly haven’t a clue about customer service either.

 

Turning away for the moment from that disaster, what’s happening on the E-MU front? Well, there’s still no sign of Vista drivers, but at least E-MU has now posted an expected delivery schedule for their software drivers and applications. I see that I can expect to wait a further month for beta versions of the software, and until Q3 for the final versions. Given that early versions of Vista were available to hardware and software developers over a year ago, and that the final version was available three months ago, to see that my E-MU hardware won’t have final software until nearly a year after Vista was released is disappointing to say the least. I’m also disappointed to see that one of my predictions of last month has come true: E-MU will not be releasing Vista versions of their Emulator-X application, I will have to upgrade to Emulator-X2 if I want to get a Vista version. Sigh.

 

The one little ray of sunshine is that, while Steinberg have discontinued their Midex 8 interface, it does appear to work using the Windows XP drivers on the 32-bit version of Vista. It does not work on the 64-bit version of Vista, apparently, so that’s a road that I can’t go down in the future. 

 

So now I twiddle my thumbs until E-MU release beta versions of their software. I have to say that I’m also not particularly confident that the beta software will work to any degree. You see, E-MU is now part of the Creative Technology company, and I’ve noticed that the quality of the software seems commensurate with that. Aren’t computers fun?

One of the toys introduced with Windows Vista is the Sidebar – a place where small applications (called "Gadgets") can live and run. I use it to hold a couple of weather and news gadgets, plus a photo gadget that shows photos that I have taken in the garden.

 

 

 

There’s a thriving community out there writing gadgets. As might be expected, their usefulness is often in the eye of the beholder. For example, here’s one for the Harry Potter fans: a countdown clock to the publication of the last book in the series.