Saw over
ActiveWin that Creative drops the Windows 2000 support for the SB PC128 CT4700:
Creative Labs, Inc. (NASDAQ: CREAF) has privately announced to their internal newsgroup subscribers that Windows 2000 support for the Creative SoundBlaster PCI128 model CT4700 was being dropped. This marks the latest round of support cuts for the manufacturer. Included with these cuts are all products acquired from Ensoniq last year as a result of that company´s acquisition by Creative. In all, over 30 models of PCI-based sound cards have been dropped leaving only those models based on the SoundBlaster LIVE! EMU-10K1 chipset and the Creative´s value-line embedded chipset, the ES1373. The ES1373 is included in many systems from Dell, Gateway, Compaq and in motherboards from Intel.
The CT4700 model PCI128 product is less than a year old and was conceived and developed after beta test versions of Windows 2000 were made publicly available to hardware vendors. Creative supplied "basic" drivers to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for inclusion with Windows 2000 and acquired a listing on Microsoft´s Windows 2000 Hardware Compatibility List. Although Creative´s website
http://www.americas.creative.com/win2k.html has been advertising new drivers for the "Sound Blaster PCI Series" since the beginning of the year, their release was repeatedly delayed until last month when, of the roughly dozen models in the Sound Blaster PCI Series only the CT475x driver was finally released. Creative´s release claims support for the other products was never planned.
The "basic" drivers included with Windows 2000 were riddled with bugs including the inability to record audio from microphone sources (preventing net-to-phone and teleconferencing applications), no support for Creative´s own EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions), lack of the four speaker support offered by the card by the Windows 95 drivers, no hardware MIDI support and serious noise problems with a wide range of motherboards. Microsoft has since dropped the a large number of Creative´s audio product from the Windows 2000 Hardware Compatibility List.
