My biggest disappointment with windows vista so far has been the sound drivers. To put it simply … Creative’s driver support for vista blows. Yeah yeah, I have heard all about how Microsoft removed directX sound hardware support for vista, and in doing so, shafted all the sound card manufacturers out there, however, there was one problem that seemed like an obvious omission and was a giant thorn in my side for a long time. There was no microphone boost option in vista and while my microphone worked, it was barely audible even if I had the damned thing inside my mouth.

A fix for this has been found, and I am thoroughly pissed off at creative for not including a way to enable/disable this option in their software. Before I go on with my bitching, here is the fix. You have to have a certain registry entry set in order to enable the mic. boost. If you are running windows vista 32 bit edition, turn on mic. boost with this:

A registry file to turn mic. boost on, in the 32 bit edition of vista

and

A registry file to turn mic. boost off, in the 32 bit edition of vista

Right click on those links.  Choose “Save File As…”, and then just double click the files to update your registry entries to enable the mic. boost feature.

If you are running the 64 bit version of vista, youll have to download the files, open them in a text editor and replace the 0007 with 0000. If none of this makes sense, you probably shouldn’t be messing with your registry settings, as it can have dire consequences for the well being of your machine. Proceed with caution and at your own risk. These registry hacks have been known to kill people. One thing to note … this setting will NOT enable a checkbox or any sort of indication that it is on. Your mic. will just be boosted. So don’t go looking for the mic. boost checkbox after you run this, hoping to verify that it worked. Test it by hooking up your mic. and listening for yourself.
So, why am I pissed at creative over this? Because this is the sort of thing that would solve what is a HUGE problem for many of their customers, and it is an incredibly simple fix. All they need to do is add a checkbox to their own software that enables/disables this registry entry. That would be 10 minutes worth of work, tops. Instead, they are lazy and they just don’t care that their customers cant get BASIC FUNCTIONALITY to work on their products under vista. Shame on you creative labs. I thought you knew better.

[UPDATE]:

I replaced the text with links to actual registry files. My apologies go out to everyone who looked at the mangled text and wondered why it causing registry editor to puke.

	
					
				

					
						This entry was posted
						 
						on June 26, 2007 @ 11:45 am and is filed under Aimless Rants.
						
													You can leave a response, or Trackback from your own site.