Cygon’s Blog

Some 8 months ago, I’ve had the fantastic idea to use Windows Vista x64 as my main development system and to dual-boot Windows XP for gaming. This is a psychologically sound scenario because I give myself a strong distinction between work  mode (Vista design, games inaccessible) and relax mode (XP design, games installed).

There has already been a lot of bad press about Vista around back then, but most of it was just the usual Microsoft-bashing and personal preference. Like 50% of the reviewers are annoyed because Vista breaks compatibility with some application while the other 50% are complaining that all the overdone compatibility stuff is preventing innovation and endlessly propagating old design flaws.

Obviously, something still isn’t right with my Vista system. 8 months ago, I did a fresh install, put Visual C# 2005 Express, Visual C++ 2005 Express (both with SP1 and Vista update) on it and created a backup of the partition. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve restored that backup in the meantime - until Vista managed to destroy even my backup image.

Incident 1: Vista bluescreened (due to Creative Labs’ broken drivers) and didn’t come back up again. Very amusing, especially when the BSOD comes twice a day. You feel like sitting in a building that might collapse any moment and you start to organize your working processes in a paranoid manner (like, save, do something, save, write down that you did, save, check again, save, do next thing…).

Incident 2: Firefox suddenly showed the Google homepage in russian language. Two days, the problem solved itself, I was now visiting Google Denmark — better than Google Klingon at least in terms of productivity. It became a real issue when Visual C# stopped working complaining about something having to do with the region & language settings…

Indicent 3: While the previous day everything was fine, when I booted Vista the next day, it bluescreened and didn’t recover.

Indicent 4: Vista crashed while I was jogging. Maybe the background defragmentation engine had begun its work and was defragmenting the file containing backup image right then. At least Vista didn’t want to come up again and when I tried to restore my backup image, it failed with a checksum error.

Incident 5: I tried to copy about 100 MB from a network share. After about 10 Minutes of waiting (I timed it!), I pressed cancel. Well, the cancel button just locked the copy dialog up… totally. I couldn’t even get rid of it by killing the process in Vista’s task manager. Attempting to reboot hung the entire system. I pressed the reset button on my case and Vista was gone.

Incident 6: Booting up, I was greeted by the classic interface instead of aero. Most other things seemed normal, just any attempt to change the theme caused an access violation. I rebooted. Vista shut down and didn’t boot anymore.

Incident 7: I have tried and tried and tried, but I haven’t even once managed to just cleanly install the updates Vista automatically downloads. Take a fresh Vista install without anything and apply the updates. There’s one update that takes about 15 minutes to apply. Several updates will just hang and you cannot shut down your PC anymore because of that. Currently, the “this application was closed because it tried to perform an invalid operation” or something dialog comes up when I do nothing but let a virgin system update itself. Tried getting back to the ‘clean’ side of things by restoring my new backup image several times.

Incidents 8-99: Did I notice that Creative Labs’ broken driver crashes this system two times a day with a BSOD telling something about a page fault in a non-paged area?

In other words, my Windows Vista is disintegrating faster than I accomplish any productive work on it. I keep my backup images pedantically clean (one single error message on screen and I consider the install impure and it will not go into a backup), I don’t install exotic or outdated software (in fact, I barely install Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express with SP1 and Vista Update and that’s about it). I don’t know what more I can do about it.

I’ll try rebuild my Vista partition from scratch once more, leaving the Creative Labs drivers out of the system, but if it continues like this I really don’t see how I can continue to use Vista. On the other hand, the x86 version ran rock-solid for 6 months (and it was a beta, build 5384 to be accurate). Maybe I should just wait for the next major Windows Version before making the switch to 64 bits.

My web server is providing access to several subversion repositories by means of mod_dav_svn, an Apache module allowing subversion clients to access repositories byconnecting to an URL managed by the Apache server.

That server is also running a continuous integration system which does automated builds of my sources as soon as I commit something new to a repository. For this to work, it checks all of the repositories once per minute. This has bloated my access_log to several megabytes of useless chatter each day.

After some searching, I discovered this method to make Apache exclude requests from localhost in access_log:

# Set 'dontlog' variable if IP address of requester is our own
SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "85.25.133.66" dontlog

# Only log this access if 'dontlog' is NOT set
CustomLog
  "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y-%m-%d_access.log"
  "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b"
  env=!dontlog

You will have to replace the logging target with your own settings, of course

Let me show you something:

These are the boxes of all the sound cards I’ve owned so far. Now what do you think I would answer if you asked me to recommend a sound card?

Anything not from Creative Labs would be my answer.

The reasons for that?

Well, let’s start by taking a look at some of this week’s topics in Creative Labs’ Vista forum:

• Thanks for everything folks, its time for me to go…
• Don’t put up with it, ask for a refund.
• How hard is it to code audio drivers? (Vista)
• Alternative Vista Sound Cards to the XFI
• Creative fails with Vista drivers.
• Why cant Creative provide….
• X-Fi on Vista is a joke, goodbye Creative!!!
• Packing my bags

So, what has happened?

Windows Vista features a completely rewritten audio kernel that provides better accuracy and improves sound quality, but ultimately cripples DirectSound 3D (more info) by seeing the sound card as a lightweight signal converter, making EAX and advanced hardware 3D audio nearly impossible.

You can’t blame Creative Labs for that. They are in fact providing hardware support by means of OpenAL (an alternative non-Microsoft audio library) and they’re working on a wrapper named ALchemy that redirects DirectSound to OpenAL, thereby reenabling EAX for Windows Vista games.

The problem with Creative Labs, plain and simple, is their drivers. All I’m asking for are drivers that:

• do not cause my ears to ring from the bad mixing quality
• do not produce crazy chirps and scratches
• do not make my Vista OS randomly BSOD twice a day

In more than one year of development time, Creative Labs has not managed to produce a proper Windows Vista driver for any of the sound cards. What little development happens seems to be directed towards the X-Fi series, Audigy owners are left out in the cold.

A statement made by a Creative Labs employee (see here) even suggests that their drivers were faulty all the time and Windows Vista’s increased demands merely exposed bugs that didn’t surface in Windows XP.

The latest driver available for my Audigy 2 has been released in March 2007. Creative Labs actually is in possession of slightly newer and better drivers, but does not release them, not even as beta drivers. One brave user has discovered the newer Audigy drivers hidden within the X-Fi drivers. He is providing them for download in his blog “No More Goat Soup“.

And that’s my rant about Creative Labs…