Is it just me, or did creative deliberatly design the Soundblaster Live to be incompatable and bug-ridden to force people to buy newer and better cards?
I dodnt really pay much attension to Soundcards, so I put a OEM Live! 5.1 in my 2200+ machine when I building thinking that it was a half decent card and wasent bad for the money. Ive not had difficulty with some games, but i've had to totally turn off the hardware acceleration to stop the piece of shit from fuzzing and skipping directsound related output on allot of stuff. Now i'm playing Star Trek - Armada (aqquired in the same budget pack as the maligned Elite Force) and the sound is just totally falling apart even without acceleration. Now its bad enough that i've got a acceleration-capable soundcard that I cant use to its full extent, but not being able to use it without the acceleration is just plain taking the piss.
So, i'm going to rip the bastard out and put it in my Net/Office machine to replace the Aureal Vortex card in there (which also has always been a pain in the arse, BSODs and random freezing galore) and replace it with an cheap OEM Audigy card. If that doesent work properly i'm going to put them both in a burning bag of crap on Creative's doorstep and throw my dead Fujitsu HD througth thier window to get thier attension. Bastards.