Check up the whole brouhaha:
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7826/
I really gotta thanks the guy that discover the dirty tricks played upon many Creative customers....
Further update: Daniel_K spoke to Wired magazine, and gave a detailed list of all the stuff Creative did to limit the functionality of their products, and his thoughts on the situation. For instance, you can basically update your Audigy cards to the functionality of and X-Fi cards by using his modded drivers. While the physical hardware is very similar across the different series of sound cards, it was the Creative drivers that said xxx function would, or would not, be activated.
"Creative purposedly modified the Audigy drivers to disable some features when Vista is detected and also purposedly introduced some bugs to prevent some XP utilities from running," Daniel_K says, in one part of his letter.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/7826/
I really gotta thanks the guy that discover the dirty tricks played upon many Creative customers....