Windows 10 November Update - Bad Creative Sound Card Driver

So, yesterday I was happily playing my music with the nice working drivers. Along comes the new Windows 10 November update to download and install, it went in fine without any issue. To my surprise the next day my speakers wern't working in full 5.1 (I have the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card) and the EAX effects didn't sound right (had no depth). So I then checked to see if the Creative Audio Panel software would open and inevitably it didn't.

I then went online and re-downloaded and installed the appropriate driver from the Creative Labs website, restarted my computer and then tried to open up the Creative Audio Panel... SUCCESS!! At least I thought until I spotted that not all the tabs at the top of the window were there (Crystalizer, EAX and X-Fi CMSS 3D). Then I decided to test with some music and again not working in 5.1 (even though it's specified in the software) and a weak quality in sound.

Please say this isn't what i'm going to have to listen to for months upon months. If anybody could help, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

BunnyJ said:

I used to have a creative sound card and the main issue I encountered was poor driver support by them. This was back in the Win7/Win8/8.1 days and I would have thought they would have remedied the situation by now.

Sorry about your issues.. I hope they update the drivers for you soon,
Jeff

Thanks, yeah Creative were pretty bad with their support, they did update most of their drivers in July/August for the Windows 10 release, i'm now hoping they release a better driver for this November update.

BunnyJ said:

I hope so for your sake. They make great hardware but they really need to up their game with the driver support. If I did get a new sound card I would get an Asus. I think that they would have better driver support.

I agree, luckily it's only a cheap thing in the first place and cheap to replace. It's funny that you can still buy it from other sellers on amazon.

BunnyJ said:

I found this card a while ago and it's seems to be a nice one and the price is rather good as well.
Amazon.com: ASUS XONAR DG Headphone Amp PCI 5.1 Audio Card: Electronics

Thanks! It looks good, although I do believe they also make a PCI-E version that also supports up to 7.1 sound. They are all good value for money though.

SOLVED! Boggles my mind how simple some of things really are, but a basic re-install of the driver instead of installing over the previous copy solved it for me. Thanks for the input Jeff, but the future looks good for me at the moment with this sound card... until maybe a Windows 10.1 comes out haha.

Yes, this is a known annoying issue with the new upgrade to Windows 10 TH2. All your drivers are updated without notice with generic Microsoft not-full-feature drivers and you have to reinstall any OEM drivers to get full functionality back. Also all customizations (colors, fonts, icons etc) are canceled and all Advanced Security settings in IE are return to the default. Apart from that, I didn't notice anything else.