For quite a while now I was think­ing on upgrad­ing my PC. My rig’s pretty old by now and I assumed, it would be best to wait until Con­roe gets released. Unfor­tu­nately, my com­puter didn’t think so and said good­bye for­ever the day before yes­ter­day. I can assure you, that really sucks. Now I’m left with my backup rig which is even older. And I don’t wanna buy com­po­nents until Con­roe is out. Intel is bring­ing their engi­neer­ing excel­lence to bear and I wanna be part of it. Ah, wait­ing until July 27th is really hard now …

As I was stat­ing here, there is some­thing wrong with the way peo­ple are treated by giant com­pa­nies. It strikes me as odd, that now there actu­ally IS a response from Cre­ative. Of course, there were some state­ments before but now they’re finally com­ing up with some details. Check it out here.

Obvi­ously, every gamer who’s expe­ri­enc­ing the popping/crackling issues owns a high-end gam­ing sys­tem. Most of these prob­lems could be reme­died with a BIOS update or a mem­ory adjust­ment but this didn’t resolve the issues for all cus­tomers. Cur­rently, Cre­ative is work­ing with promi­nent moth­er­board and chipset man­u­fac­tur­ers and will report back within the next 2 weeks. Now, that’s the atti­tude I like to see …

Yeah, it’s true. For the 12th time the world’s most antic­i­pated trade-only event kicks off today and many peo­ple around the world have been wait­ing eagerly for this day. The Elec­tronic Enter­tain­ment Expo takes place at the Los Ange­les Con­ven­tion Cen­ter with more than 400 exhibit­ing com­pa­nies rep­re­sent­ing 90 coun­tries. We’ll get to see the lat­est com­puter and video games and tech­nolo­gies within 540,000 net square feet of exhibit space. Wait a minute. No, we’re not gonna see that in per­son. Since the trade event is not open to the gen­eral pub­lic we have to rely on the usual sus­pects for sup­ply­ing us with all the lat­est infor­ma­tion on upcom­ing games and gear. So, we browse over to E³ Insider, Next Gen­er­a­tion, GameSpot’s mon­ster cov­er­age, IGN’s E³ Cen­tral, and G4 TV. There are many other sites report­ing in from LACC, I’m aware of that, but I’m more than sat­is­fied with the ones listed above.

A major­ity of about 60 per­cent of E³ exhibitors are said to get the show­cased games into stores by the hol­i­day sea­son. That’s some­thing, I sup­pose. Well, I’m not that big a gamer any­more. The last game I was fas­ci­nated of was Prince Of Per­sia: The Two Thrones. Although it was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing it still is one of my favorite games. Last year, UbiSoft made quite some fuss about that game on E³ 2005. It didn’t live up to the great expec­ta­tions. And so we’re mov­ing on to this year’s trade show. Ah, I wish I could be there, walk­ing from booth to booth, check­ing out all the new stuff. I’m plan­ning to attend the show at least once in the years ahead. In the mean­time I’m dig­ging through the cov­er­age avail­able on the net right now …

Usu­ally, that means that an enter­prise takes care of its cus­tomers. One would expect – in the IT busi­ness, for instance – a com­pany to solve (crit­i­cal) issues, to take on prob­lems, and to pro­vide their cus­tomers with peri­od­i­cal soft­ware and firmware updates. In short – it should try to address every prob­lem, even minor ones, in order to sat­isfy the needs of its cus­tomers. In the long term, no com­pany can suc­ceed with­out proper cus­tomer care management.

Obvi­ously, that’s not really true as is evi­denced here. I wanted to buy one of the cards of Creative’s new rev­o­lu­tion­ary X-Fi lineup. Back then, it seemed very impres­sive and pow­er­ful, a real break­through. Well, I don’t doubt that – the card really is an intrigu­ing piece of hard­ware. Right before I wanted to go to the next com­puter store and get me a sound card of this lineup, I searched online for some help in the decision-making process of what model to buy. It was only when I lit­er­ally stum­bled over hun­dreds of posts com­plain­ing about many issues; pop­ping and crack­ling noises made it num­ber one amongst all com­plaints. As an owner of a Cre­ative sound card I’ve been seri­ously dis­ap­pointed by the lack of inter­est the com­pany seems to have in these problems.

If Cre­ative isn’t going to change their cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment or their pol­icy regard­ing fix­ing known issues, I don’t think my next audio proces­sor will be a Cre­ative prod­uct. I can do pretty well with­out EAX but I can’t do with­out work­ing dri­vers pro­vid­ing me with good audio. The X-Fi is an extremely good card and I think it’s very sad I can’t just plug it in and play with­out hav­ing to fear some difficulties …