A creative example of the value of free drivers

Creative's hardware should be classed into two categories -- pre-Live, and post-Live.  The
SBLive was revolutionary when it first came out, and managed to outlast the competition that
sprung up around the new 3D positional audio standards.  (They didn't kill Aureal when they
bought it; it was already a corpse by that point)

But, like so many other hardware markets, the integration of audio onto motherboards (starting
with the i810 chipset) all but killed the add-in sound market, taking it from a "everyone
needs to buy a basic sound card" to a luxury item for gamers and studio work.

The reasons for people having problems with the SBLive was that it was merely
PCI2.0-compliant; later revs of the PCI spec tightened some ambiguious stuff, and some
assumptions Creative made became out-of-spec, or close enough to the threshold that the
motherboard (and other add-in card) quality mattered.  

Well, that and finiky Win2K drivers, but that was hardly a problem unique to Creative Labs.

But if I were to consider buying a new sound card today, Creative's would be on the list to
evaluate; it's foolish to carry a prejudice based on a product two generations old.