Dell uses fake soundblaster card?

[Ferocious]

I got the Soundblaster Live! card with my Dell system for Xmas.

I downloaded an update from Creative and during installation it reported that I did not have any Soundblaster card installed!

Device manager reports everything is smooth.

Dell has no driver updates for this card. :disgust:

 

[nycdude]

I heard about this.

On their Audio forum, there are tons of threads on this.

Good luck.

 

[AT]

Pretty common OEM procedure.

Laptop display drivers another really bad example.

 

[Sunner]

Are you sure it's a Soundblaster, rather than a "Sountblaster compatible" ?

 

[Ferocious]

Premium Sound Blaster® Live! 5.1 Cinema-quality audio

Legally....I guess that could mean a Dell card that is Soundblaster compatible. But obviously not fully compliant.

And in any case.....it's quite deceiving.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I went through this on a client's Dell about a 1 1/2 yrs ago, I downloaded the drivers and software for the exact model SBLive he had because he lost most of his software moving and they didn't work. So I told him to call Dell while I was there and let me talk to them and the rep said that model was only used by Dell and Compaq and the reason they didn't make the software and drivers available from the site is it was too big. I hope that's changed since so many more people are on broadband now, but neways he went ahead and shipped a new disk overnight! even though the warranty on the system had been up for a good while so I was impressed with how Dell's C.S. worked.

 

[RyanVM]

What's most-likely happening is that your Dell card has a PCI deviceid that isn't recognized by the Creative installer. You can try installing the patched Audigy2 drivers, as I know that MANY PCI deviceid's were added to the ctcomp.oem file when they modded it. It's quite possible that the Dell one was as well.

Not to mention that the Audigy2 drivers are a better set of drivers anyway