I will never purchase another Creative sound card. And probably none of their other products. Most people I talk to share the same attitude.

"I will never purchase another Creative sound card." More people need this attitude towards Creative. It's time for filk to start switching to a different company with good hardware and drivers.

Yes but to where do we go? I have an audigy2 platinum with the live drive, although the hardware itself is probably good the drivers are just flat-out worthless. I have a 6.1 sound system, the hercules cards I looked at were only 5.1 and 7.1 Since I bought this card my windows bootup time has almost tripled, lockups in games, sound manager on the taskbar crashes all the time, when eax is enabled on many games it knocks my frame rates way down, just so many problems and i feel like I am stuck with an unsupported card since creative keeps producing shit drivers. When I first bought it I was running windows me and it simply wouldn't work at all so I went out and bought XP and it worked better after that but is still a crappy product overall I feel due to drivers. Ho hum...

LOL If you have Problems it is for sure NOT the card ... tried reinstalling windows ... use new driver ?? I loved my SB Live! and I now like my Audigy 2 very much its awesome and the only Problem I ever experienced is that when I go install the Beta driver before using the driver CD the Mixer install does not work correctly ... so just ... first install from CD with original driver THEN update to 402 PERFECT can't understand why to hate creative SOUNDCARDS! .... EAX rocks