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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stribe30 who wrote (35544)	4/12/2001 7:59:19 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Stribe30: Re: "(Warning - computer enthusiast tech geek rambling about to ensue)" I have owned Turtle Beach cards before. I find that Windows drivers are not as good as the Creative ones. They were less robust when dealing with things like joysticks, midi connections, and DSP downloading. Perhaps they have fixed up them since I owned them, but my Creative SBLive (original and value versions) have no such problems. I currently do not use WinME or Win2K. Since most of the use in Windows is for games, I see no reason to upgrade at this time. I use Linux when it comes time to do heavy duty number crunching work. There the drivers for SBLives are far better than the ones for TB cards. After watching co workers writing WinNT2K drivers for Amtelco products, I can see why the drivers for new MS OSes are so rare. The development environment is terrible wrt UNIX. The internal APIs are very hard to work with and where Linux can have one driver for ISA, PCI, Compact PCI, PCI64, and other Buses, WinNT2K requires a separate driver for each bus type. This chews up resources both within a system and development team time. The worst part is that Microsoft keeps throwing out the "baby with the bath water" in each new version. Each new version uses new APIs and the old ones are no longer supported. This is rediculous. Now you should see why corporations refuse to upgrade until all of the old hardware is fully supported in the new version, and then they may move (some are getting the idea that they move only when forced to (and maybe not even then)). (Rant off) Pete

To: stribe30 who wrote (35544)	4/12/2001 11:47:11 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Scott: A bit of advice for those upgrading: if you use Windows ME, Creative Labs products seem to not have very good drivers for it We all have our favorite accessories companies, I guess. Pete's post indicates he quite likes Creative Labs... personally, my favorite is Guillemot (French company - but then that's not really their fault... or maybe it is ;-)). They've gone the traditional route of buying up any small-medium sized accessories maker that does a good job. Their main brands now are Hercules (graphics) and Thrustmaster (game controllers). I'm using one of each atm (a Thrustmaster force feedback wheel and a Hercules GeForce1 DDR w. TV-Out) and am immensely pleased with both. Creative garnered a lot of respect from me a couple of years ago when they really put a lot of extra effort into their graphics drivers (e.g. by making a Glide to OpenGL wrapper for their NVIDIA graphics cards). Most other manufacturers just recompiled NVIDIA's standard drivers, adding only their name and logo. Guillemot, btw, was also the first company to sign on to produce a board based on the Kyro2 chip. Interestingly enough, Creative just added their name to that list ;-). Besides game controllers and graphics products, Guillemot also makes other stuff under their own brand (i.e. Guillemot). Although I haven't had the chance to try any of them, their sound cards do support both A3D and EAX (as well as some SensAura positional stuff). From my experience with their other products alone, I will probably go for a Guillemot sound board next time I need one. Guillemot's biggest fault is their downright pathetic web site. Half the country versions don't work properly (incl. the US one) and the rest are rather confusing. -fyo