I have a new pretty top end system that was working fine with XP then came through the letterbox the Dell upgrade to Vista. After following the pre and post installation instructions (CDROM) to the letter I have had a week of nightmares and spent days trying to get the system functioning to somewhere near normal. Amongst the many issues is the complete loss of sound. The Creative X-Fi Extreme sound card can not be recognised when trying to install the drivers downloaded from the Creative site and designed for Vista. Now I have a silent FSX and can't play any music or videos.Help and assistance is sparse - Dell struggle to even follow Vista's new layout and just recommend a 'clean-install' - with subsequent loss of all data including many purchased downloads for FSX - not an option in my case.FSX does work without sound but without any appreciable improvements, in fact after a return to the screen following a menu intervention it takes a very long time (about 2 minutes) for the graphics to redraw.If you are considering upgrade to Vista - my advice would be to wait 6 months for all the bugs and drivers to catch up with Bill Gates' latest operating system, and yes the dreaded blue screens still happen!.

X-fiSee creative foruns for not detected crads during driver install. Also, there are available drivers in Windows update.NVIDIAIn guru3d you can find the 101.70 and some discussions about the 7950Jos

hi, For now if your motherboard has sound capabilities use that.the web site Blackviper.com has some pretty good information on vista.Tips and tweeks to help you through.If Vista will not recognise your card drivers will not help.You have to install the hi-fi drivers not regular ones don't know why but i installed the hd drivers and it worked.Sorry i can't be of any more help.stu

I have a similar system (Dell 710HC) and recently upgraded to Vista. It has not been a "nightmare" as you suggest to upgrade but it provided me with many challenging moments.... I'm still working on some periodic BSOD issues.... After you install Vista, I recommend checking your drivers and make sure they are signed and verified by MS. Vista does not like ANY unsigned drivers. Click on Run and type in sigverif and follow the instructions. I found all the drivers for my Creative X-Fi card were not signed (I downloaded the latest Vista drivers from Creative). I uninstalled all the Creative drivers and then went on the Dell site and downloaded the Vista drivers for my card they had on their driver update site for your system. The card has limited functions but it works great and I no longer have any unsigned drivers showing. Do NOT download the Vista drivers off the Soundblaster or Creative sites. They are loaded with unsigned drivers. Hopefully, Creative will get out fully compatible drivers in the near future. Do the same as above for any other unsigned drivers you find. You can check for any problems with your system (slow startup, shutdown, graphics, etc.) by going to the Performance Program. Right click the Computer icon on your desktop, select Properties, click on Performance at the bottom of the screen. Click on Advanced Tools and then look for any problems under Performance issues. There's a lot of other things you can do by clicking on other items under the Performance program to help you discover and possibly fix any issues. Hope this helps.Best regards,Jim

The X-Fi drivers were the most troublesome for me too; however, there are new Vista Drivers for this card on the Creative Website. They seem to work quite well. Just delete the old ones first. I love Vista, and FSX works great with it; it's only going to get better with SP1.Don't get discouraged...the sound and graphic drivers will soon be so good that this will only be a bad memory. X-Fi is do-able, but it takes patience. Here's the Creative link (also read their forums...they're a great help)http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/

Hey guys - how refreshing to see so many folks jump in here with some positive and helpful suggestions, thanks to you all. I was a very regulray user of this and other FS forums in the past but over the last few years work seems to have taken up too much time to be able to enjoy the sessions spent both supporting and being supported by fellow flight simulator enthusiasts.Right - looks like another busy day going through all of the above 'hints n tips' - I'm sure my 'nightmare' will just be memories of a bad dream!.Thanks again - Dave

Read this: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...92309&mode=fullI am trying not to be overly negative, but this is yet another example of Creative's mismanagement and poor driver support.Pat

I hear ya. I have a E660 on a ABit 680i chipset board with an EVGA 8800GTS and Creative X-Fi. I bought Vista for the system, but until they come out with SP1 and a second wave of drivers all around I'm rolling back to my 2005 Ed. of Windows Media Center. Too many apps that wouldn't run correctly, and their whole UAC is messed up. Ever notice that FSX cannot add its shortcut to your desktop? And what is up with being an 'administrator' and still having to implicitly indicate to run programs as an administrator. I'm an IT Pro, I don't need some OS to baby feed me through everything.Other than the newer GUI, I didn't see too many advantages to the new OS..maybe after they come out with a SP I'll try it again.

You can kill UAC...I did.SP1 looks like its coming late this year:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060137,00.asp

Yeah this cant be right, I'm using creative drivers in vista RC1 (still yes lol) with my X-fi basic card and it works fine....I actually might be using international drivers I found off the creative forums with my 32bit vistahttp://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/bo...message.id=1694http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/bo...message.id=8919

in creatives defense vista totally changed the way Windows handles sound, in earlier versions the sound had much more priority and if your sound system crashed it would take windows down with it. That is something they "fixed" with Vista.