Dan: what's the hardware (motherboard & sound circuitry) in your computer? You may be able to source a driver from elsewhere that'll work with your gear.

What a joke vista is! It is now June and still no sound driver! I contacted my computer manufacturer where they hung up on me twice! What a con job this vista is! It sucks!

David Pogue's review was quite good I thought.

Pete: this blog entry (not article) was written on December 16. The Nvidia drivers only became available a couple of days ago.

I've looked into the sound driver issue a bit more, and believe the reason for the Vista sound drivers lacking in features compared to the XP ones is the radical change to the audio layer in the OS. Basically, there's no DirectSound hardware acceleration anymore. That's because kernel-mode audio drivers for XP were the biggest reason for system instability according to Microsoft.

However, the rear speakers now work... I'd like to check out some of the audio tuning features in Vista, but will need a good microphone for that. Will report back when I have one.

Apologies for the late replies to the comments (thanks, btw, for stopping by)...

Steve: yes, you can turn off UAC, but not completely. Vista continues to nag you about it, saying "your system is at risk" in Security Centre. Of course, you can turn off alerts from Security Centre too, but that's two safety features gone. Also, if you turn off UAC, IE7 no longer runs in Protected Mode, so on balance, it's just to easier to grit your teeth and leave UAC on.

quote:
Twas the Vista before Christmas, when all through the house
A Windows geek was desperately weilding his mouse
Trying to run the programs that work on XP
But on Microsoft's wondrous new OS crash because of UAC"

...umm, you realise that you can turn UAC off if you want to?

Official WHQL Certified nVidia ForceWare drivers v97.46 for Vista (6000 and above) has just been released.

The following sentence needs to be corrected:
"The XP one has all kinds of features like Sonic Focus and Dolby 5.1 Prologic processing but the XP one doesn't."

For what it's worth there are many new features in Vista that should be given credit to.

Perhaps it is about time this article is updated?

afterr 5 years in develoment, you'd thought there wood have been drivers for everything except the latest hardware.

Vista will *not* be okay by the end of January. Vista's big problems stem from implementing copy protection and content management restrictions at the driver level. That's why you don't have nvidia and ATI drivers yet. That's why your rear speakers don't work.

Microsoft has specified to hardware manufacturers that your video and audio drivers will deliberately degrade video and audio output quality when playing "premium" protected content.

Check out this assessment of Vista content protection, and then ask yourself who actually stands to benefit from Vista. You? Fat chance. Vista is a total suckup to the content providers.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

Vista will *not* be okay by the end of January. Vista's big problems stem from implementing copy protection and content management restrictions at the driver level. That's why you don't have nvidia and ATI drivers yet. That's why your rear speakers don't work.

Microsoft has specified to hardware manufacturers that your video and audio drivers will deliberately degrade video and audio output quality when playing "premium" protected content.

Check out this assessment of Vista content protection, and then ask yourself who actually stands to benefit from Vista. You? Fat chance. Vista is a total suckup to the content providers.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

Windows Vista is a silly idea for everyone involved. Leave it where it belongs: nowhere. Have a look: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/technology/14pogue.html
Talk about faint praise. It's sad to see Microsoft fail so utterly in achieving anything new or interesting after all that hype. If you want progress, try Linux - that's where the action is.

Windows Vista is a silly idea for everyone involved. Leave it where it belongs: nowhere. Have a look: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/technology/14pogue.html
Talk about faint praise. It's sad to see Microsoft fail so utterly in achieving anything new or interesting after all that hype. If you want progress, try Linux - that's where the action is.

OS X 10.4 + Bootcamp gives you WinXP native on the Intel Mac
OS X 10.5 Leopard brings you the future...

"Think Different"

Heh, it seems to be a regular occurrence with Windows users saying "maybe next year things will get better".

vista should be ok by the end of Jan. It is intensely annoying that big companies like Nvidia and ATI still don't have drivers out yet though.

I guess that there's only a handful of people trying to install and run the OS at the moment, but even so, the driver situation is pretty lame.

MS should start putting the screws on all the peripherals people big time!