The Ow Starts Now

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Some Googling told me that I wasn’t the only one with this issue, which is always something of a comfort. It seems that Vista, Quicktime, and certain Intel RAID controllers just don’t get along – causing the slow Quicktime performance and blue screens. Odd, but at least my hard disks weren’t to blame.

The next piece of fun was logging off from one user and switching to another (the wife and I have separate logins). I never had any problems under XP doing this, but every now and again, when logging out of one user and moving to the other, I’d simply get a black screen, with an ‘Out of sync message’. If I moved the monitor cable from one DVI port on the graphics card to the other, the picture would come back, but that was hardly an acceptable situation.

My newly Vista’d up work machine meanwhile was giving me even more grief. I’d heard that there wasn’t full support for Creative sound cards in Vista so had taken out an Audigy 4 and decided to go with on-board sound. However, despite the drivers for the Realtek chip being installed and apparently working perfectly I was getting no sound at all. It was quite bizarre. So back in went the Audigy 4.

It was then that I found out that the ridiculous situation that exists with Vista and Creative hardware. You can get basic sound, but out of the box, you won’t get any support for Direct3D or EAX at all. No surround sound, no high quality audio – nothing. It seems that in its wisdom, , Microsoft has decided to remove from Direct X 10 the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that enables cards such as the Audigy or X-Fi to talk directly to the OS. Thus cutting edge gaming cards will only give you basic stereo sound.

Creative has come up with a solution by releasing software called Alchemy, that essentially translates the Direct3D or EAX calls that the hardware makes and converting them into OpenAL, which is what DX10 now supports as standard. Creative offers Alchemy free for X-Fi owners, but if you’ve got an Audigy, you’re expected to fork out – only $10 (about five quid), but it’s still annoying.

I asked Creative about this and it told me that it was to recoup the extra development work it had to do to support older cards. I asked it why Microsoft had chosen to take out the HAL and thus cause this problem and was told that it really did not know - I’d have to ask Microsoft.

I will do this at some point. I’d like also to ask why it saw fit to make DirectX10 Vista only. I don’t buy for a second that there’s any insurmountable technical reason it could only release Direct X10 for Vista – it’s just a rather lame way of getting people to upgrade to Vista to play um.. Halo 2. Wow, a three year old Xbox game and Shadownrun, which has already been cracked for DX9 anyway.

I then had the pleasure in discovering that my Palm Lifedrive was only partially supported under Vista – the LifeDrive Manager software was a no-go for some reason. Probably because it’s the wrong colour or something.

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