How to Update Device Drivers Quickly & Easily
Tech Tip: Updating drivers manually requires some computer skills and patience. A faster and easier option is to use the Driver Update Utility for Creative Labs to scan your system for free. The utility tells you which specific drivers are out-of-date for all of your devices.
Jun 14, 2000 - creative labs, inc. (nasdaq: creaf) has privately announced to their internal newsgroup subscribers that windows 2000 support for the creative. Creative Labs Customer Service USA, Technical Support Phone Number +800 -988-1000 @creative www.creative.com Creative Labs USA customer care contact information like Customer Helpline Number, Email Id, Dealers, Head Office Addresses are provided below to help the customers get the services easily.
Step 1 - Download Your Driver
To get the latest driver, including Windows 10 drivers, you can choose from a list of most popular Creative Labs downloads. Click the download button next to the matching model name. After you complete your download, move on to Step 2.
If your driver is not listed and you know the model name or number of your Creative Labs device, you can use it to search our driver archive for your Creative Labs device model. Simply type the model name and/or number into the search box and click the Search button. You may see different versions in the results. Choose the best match for your PC and operating system.
If you don’t know the model name or number, you can start to narrow your search down by choosing which category of Creative Labs device you have (such as Printer, Scanner, Video, Network, etc.). Start by selecting the correct category from our list of Creative Labs Device Drivers by Category.
Need more help finding the right driver? You can request a driver and we will find it for you. We employ a team from around the world. They add hundreds of new drivers to our site every day.
Tech Tip: If you are having trouble deciding which is the right driver, try the Driver Update Utility for Creative Labs. It is a software utility that will find the right driver for you - automatically.
Creative Labs updates their drivers regularly. To get the latest Windows 10 driver, you may need to go to Creative Labs website to find the driver for to your specific Windows version and device model.
Step 2 - Install Your Driver
After you download your new driver, then you have to install it. To install a driver in Windows, you will need to use a built-in utility called Device Manager. It allows you to see all of the devices recognized by your system, and the drivers associated with them.
How to Open Device Manager
- In Windows 8.1 & Windows 10, right-click the Start menu and select Device Manager
- In Windows 8, swipe up from the bottom, or right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose 'All Apps' -> swipe or scroll right and choose 'Control Panel' (under Windows System section) -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager
- In Windows 7, click Start -> Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager
- In Windows Vista, click Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Device Manager
- In Windows XP, click Start -> Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager button
How to Install drivers using Device Manager
- Locate the device and model that is having the issue and double-click on it to open the Properties dialog box.
- Select the Driver tab.
- Click the Update Driver button and follow the instructions.
In most cases, you will need to reboot your computer in order for the driver update to take effect.
Tech Tip: Driver downloads and updates come in a variety of file formats with different file extensions. For example, you may have downloaded an EXE, INF, ZIP, or SYS file. Each file type has a slighty different installation procedure to follow.
If you are having trouble installing your driver, you should use the Driver Update Utility for Creative Labs. It is a software utility that automatically finds, downloads and installs the right driver for your system. You can even backup your drivers before making any changes, and revert back in case there were any problems.
Try it now to safely update all of your drivers in just a few clicks. Once you download and run the utility, it will scan for out-of-date or missing drivers:
When the scan is complete, the driver update utility will display a results page showing which drivers are missing or out-of-date. You can update individual drivers, or all of the necessary drivers with one click.
For more help, visit our Driver Support Page for step-by-step videos on how to install drivers for every file type.
Public (SGX: C76) | |
Industry | Consumer electronics |
---|---|
Founded | 1 July 1981; 38 years ago |
Founder | Sim Wong Hoo Ng Kai Wa |
Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Sim Wong Hoo(CEO) Ng Keh Long (CFO) | |
Products | Multimedia, IT, Consumer electronics |
Revenue | US$66.1 million (2018)[1] |
US$40.4 million (2018)[1] | |
800 (2012)[2] | |
Subsidiaries | ZiiLABS, E-mu Systems and Ensoniq (merged), Cambridge SoundWorks |
Website | www.creative.com |
Creative Technology Ltd. (known as Creative Labs in the United States) is a global technology company headquartered in Jurong East, Singapore with additional offices in Silicon Valley, Dublin, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The principal activities of the company and its subsidiaries consist of the design, manufacture and distribution of digitized sound and video boards, computers and related multimedia and personal digital entertainment products. It also partners with mainboard manufacturers and laptop brands to embed its Sound Blaster technology on their products.[3]
- 1History
- 2Products
- 3See also
History[edit]
1981–1996[edit]
Creative Technology was founded in 1981 by childhood friends and Ngee Ann Polytechnic schoolmates Sim Wong Hoo and Ng Kai Wa. Originally a computer repair shop in Pearl's Centre in Chinatown, the company eventually developed an add-on memory board for the Apple II computer. Later, Creative spent $500,000 developing the Cubic CT, an IBM-compatible PC adapted for the Chinese language and featuring multimedia features like enhanced color graphics and a built-in audio board capable of producing speech and melodies. With lack of demand for multilingual computers and few multimedia software applications available, the Cubic was a commercial failure.
Creative Music System sound card
Shifting focus from language to music, Creative developed the Creative Music System, a PC add-on card. Sim established Creative Labs, Inc. in the United States' Silicon Valley and convinced software developers to support the sound card, re-named Game Blaster and marketed by RadioShack'sTandy division. The success of this audio interface led to the development of the standalone Sound Blastersound card, introduced at the 1989 COMDEX show just as the multimedia PC market, fueled by Intel's 386 card and Windows 3.0, took off. The success of Sound Blaster helped grow Creative's revenue from $5.4 million USD in 1989 to $658 million USD in 1994.[4]
In 1993, the year after Creative’s Initial Public Offering, in 1992, former Ashton-Tate CEO Ed Esber joined Creative Labs as CEO to assemble a management team to support the company’s rapid growth. Esber brought in a team of US executives, including Rich Buchanan (graphics), Gail Pomerantz (marketing), and Rich Sorkin (sound products, and later communications, OEM and business development).[5] This group played key roles in reversing a brutal market share decline caused by intense competition from Mediavision at the high end and Aztech at the low end. Sorkin, in particular, dramatically strengthened the company's brand position through crisp licensing and an aggressive defense of Creative's intellectual property positions while working to shorten product development cycles.
At the same time, Esber and the original founders of the company had differences of opinion on the strategy and positioning of the company. Esber exited in 1995, followed quickly by Buchanan and Pomerantz. Following Esber’s departure, Sorkin was promoted to General Manager of Audio and Communications Products and later Executive Vice-President of Business Development and Corporate Investments, before leaving Creative in 1996 to run Elon Musk’s first startup and internet pioneer Zip2.
By 1996, Creative's revenues had peaked at $1.6 billion USD. With pioneering investments in VOIP and media streaming, Creative was well-positioned to take advantage of the internet era, but ventured into the CD-ROM market and was eventually forced to write off nearly $100 million USD in inventory when the market collapsed due to a flood of cheaper alternatives.[6]
1997–present[edit]
The firm had maintained a strong foothold in the EISA PC audio market until 14 July 1997 when Aureal Semiconductor entered the soundcard market with their very competitive PCI AU8820 Vortex 3D sound technology. The firm at the time was in development of their own in house PCI audio cards but were finding little success adopting to the PCI standard. In January 1998 in order to quickly facilitate a working PCI audio technology, the firm made the acquisition of Ensoniq for US$77 million. On March 5, 1998 the firm sued Aureal[7] with patent infringement claims over a MIDI caching technology[8] held by E-mu Systems. Aureal filed a counterclaim[9] stating the firm was intentionally interfering with its business prospects, had defamed them, commercially disparaged, engaged in unfair competition with intent to slow down Aureals sales and acted fraudulently. The suit had come only days after Aureal gained a fair market with the AU8820 Vortex1.
In August 1998 the Sound Blaster Live! was the firm's first sound card developed for the PCI bus in order to compete with upcoming Aureal AU8830 Vortex2 sound chip.[10] Aureal at this time were making fliers comparing their new AU8830 chips to the now shipping Sound Blaster Live!. The specifications within these fliers comparing the AU8830 to the Sound Blaster Live! EMU10K1 chip sparked another flurry of lawsuits against Aureal,[11] this time claiming Aureal had falsely advertised the Sound Blaster Live!'s capabilities.[12]
In December 1999 after numerous lawsuits, Aureal won a favourable ruling but went bankrupt as a result of legal costs and their investors pulling out. Their assets were acquired by Creative through the bankruptcy court in September 2000 for US$32 million.[13] The firm had in effect removed their only major direct competitor in the 3D gaming audio market, excluding their later acquisition of Sensaura.
In April 1999, the firm launched the NOMAD line of digital audio players that would later introduce the MuVo and ZEN series of portable media players. In November 2004, the firm announced a $100 million marketing campaign to promote their digital audio products, including the ZEN range of MP3 players.[14]
The firm applied for U.S. Patent 6,928,433 on 5 January 2001 and was awarded the patent on 9 August 2005.[15] The ZEN Patent was awarded to the firm for the invention of user interface for portable media players. This opened the way for potential legal action against Apple's iPod and the other competing players.[citation needed] The firm took legal actions against Apple in May 2006. In August, 2006, Creative and Apple entered into a broad settlement,[16] with Apple paying Creative $100 million for the licence to use the Zen patent.[17] The firm then joined the 'Made for iPod' program.
On 22 March 2005, The Inquirer reported that Creative Labs had agreed to settle in a class action lawsuit about the way its Audigy and Extigy soundcards were marketed. The firm offered customers who purchased the cards up to a $62.50 reduction on the cost of their next purchase of its products, while the lawyers involved in filing the dispute against Creative received a payment of approximately $470,000.[18]
In 2007, Creative voluntarily delisted itself from NASDAQ, where it had the symbol of CREAF.[19] Its stocks are now solely on the Singapore Exchange (SGX-ST).
In early 2008, Creative Labs' technical support centre, located in Stillwater, Oklahoma, US laid off several technical support staff, furthering ongoing concerns surrounding Creative's financial situation. Later that year, the company faced a public-relations backlash when it demanded that a user named 'Daniel_K' cease distributing modified versions of drivers for Windows Vista which restored functionality that had been available in drivers for Windows XP.[20][21] The company deleted his account from its online forums but reinstated it a week later.[22]
In January 2009, the firm generated internet buzz with a mysterious website[23] promising a 'stem cell-like' processor which would give a 100-fold increase in supercomputing power over current technology, as well as advances in consumer 3D graphics.[24] At CES 2009, it was revealed to be the ZMS-05 processor from ZiiLABS, a subsidiary formed from the combining of 3DLabs and Creative's Personal Digital Entertainment division.[25]
In November 2012, the firm announced it has entered into an agreement with Intel Corporation for Intel to licence technology and patents from ZiiLABS Inc. Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative, and acquire engineering resources and assets related to its UK branch as a part of a $50 million deal. ZiiLABS (still wholly owned by Creative) continues to retain all ownership of its StemCell media processor technologies and patents, and will continue to supply and support its ZMS series of chips to its customers.[26]
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2018, its Super X-Fi dongle won the Best of CES 2018 Award by AVS Forum.[27] The product was launched after more than $100 million in investment and garnered positive analyst reports.[17]
The company is still producing Chinese-language and bilingual software for the Singapore market, however nearly half of the company's income is generated in the United States and South America; the European Union represents 32% of revenues, with Asia making the remainder.[28]
Products[edit]
Sound Blaster[edit]
Sound Blaster Omni Surround 5.1
Creative Sound Blaster is one of the most recognized names in the PC audio market. Creative's Sound Blastersound card was among the first dedicated audio processing cards to be made widely available to the general consumer. As the first to bundle what is now considered to be a part of a sound card system: digital audio, on-board music synthesizer, MIDI interface and a joystick port, Sound Blaster rose to become a de facto standard for sound cards in PCs for many years. Creative Technology have made their own file format Creative Voice which has file format
.voc
In 1987 Creative Technology released the Creative Music System (C/MS), a 12-voice sound card for the IBM PC architecture. When C/MS struggled to acquire market share, Sim traveled from Singapore to Silicon Valley and negotiated a deal with RadioShack's Tandy division to market the product as the Game Blaster,.[29] While the Game Blaster did not overcome AdLib's sound card market dominance, Creative used the platform to create the first Sound Blaster, which retained CM/S hardware and added the Yamaha YM3812 chip found on the AdLib card, as well as adding a component for playing and recording digital samples. Creative aggressively marketed the 'stereo' aspect of the Sound Blaster (only the C/MS chips were capable of stereo, not the complete product) to calling the sound producing micro-controller a 'DSP,' hoping to associate the product with a digital signal processor (the DSP could encode/decode ADPCM in real time, but otherwise had no other DSP-like qualities). Monaural Sound Blaster cards were introduced in 1989, and Sound Blaster Pro stereo cards followed in 1992. The 16-bit Sound Blaster AWE32 added Wavetable MIDI, and AWE64 offered 32 and 64 voices.
Sound Blaster achieved competitive control of the PC audio market by 1992, the same year that its main competitor, Ad Lib, Inc., went bankrupt.[30] In the mid-1990s, following the launch of the Sound Blaster 16 and related products, Creative Technologies' audio revenue grew from US$40 million to nearly $1 billion annually.
The sixth generation of Sound Blaster sound cards introduced SBX Pro Studio, a feature that restores the highs and lows of compressed audio files, enhancing detail and clarity. SBX Pro Studio also offers user settings for controlling bass and virtual surround.[31]
Creative X-Fi Sonic Carrier[edit]
The Creative X-Fi Sonic Carrier, launched in January 2016, consists of a long main unit and a subwoofer that houses 17 drivers in an 11.2.4 speaker configuration. It incorporates Dolby Atmos surround processing, and also features Creative's EAX 15.2 Dimensional Audio to extract, enhance and upscale sound from legacy material.
The audio and video engine of the X-Fi Sonic Carrier are powered by 7 processors with a total of 14 cores. It supports both local and streaming video content at up to 4K 60fps, as well as 15.2 channels of high resolution audio playback.
It also comes with 3 distinct wireless technologies that allow multi-room Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a zero-latency speaker-to-speaker link to up to 4 subwoofer units.[32]
Other products[edit]
- Headphones
- Gaming headsets
- Portable Bluetooth speakers
- Creative GigaWorks ProGamer G500 speakers
![Creative Creative](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125730024/141139139.png)
Discontinued products[edit]
- CD and DVD players, drives, and controller cards
- Prodikeys, a computer keyboard-musical keyboard combination
- Optical mice and keyboards
See also[edit]
Creative Labs office in Milpitas, California
Divisions and brands[edit]
- ZiiLABS, formerly 3dlabs
References[edit]
- ^ ab'CREATIVE Fiscal Year 2018 Annual Report'(PDF).
- ^'Creative Technology Ltd. | Company profile from Hoover's'. Hoovers.com. Retrieved 11 November 2010.
- ^(C) Creative Labs 1999-2015. 'Creative OEM Partners'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^Jason Dedrick; Kenneth L. Kraemer (20 August 1998). Asia's Computer Challenge: Threat or Opportunity for the United States and the World?. Oxford University Press. pp. 179–180. ISBN978-0-19-535280-1.
- ^http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Esber_Edward/Esber_Edward.oral_history.2004.102657944.pdf
- ^'Asiaweek.com - Technology - Creative's Genius - 9/29/2000'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'Internet Archive Wayback Machine'. 29 August 1999. Archived from the original on 29 August 1999.Cite uses deprecated parameter
|dead-url=
(help) - ^'Creative Labs v. Aureal'. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 17 April 2015.Cite uses deprecated parameter
|deadurl=
(help) - ^'Writs fly as Aureal countersues Creative Technologies'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'Aureal Welcomes Creative Labs to Competitive Marketplace'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'Creative Files False Advertising and Other Claims Against Aureal'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'A3D30prm'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'ALive!'. Archived from the original on 10 October 2007. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^Smith, Tony (18 November 2004). 'The Register 'Creative declares war on iPod', 18 November 2004'. Theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 11 November 2010.
- ^'Press Relations'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'Press Relations'. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^ ab'A Steve Jobs Rival Who Hit Hard Times Makes Remarkable Comeback'. Bloomberg. Retrieved 21 March 2019.
- ^Burns, Simon (22 March 2005). 'Creative Labs owes you $62'. The Inquirer. Retrieved 26 March 2010.
- ^'Creative Technology Announces Completion of Its Voluntary Delisting from Nasdaq - Company's Sole Exchange Listing Now On the SGX-ST' (Press release). Creative. 4 September 2007. Archived from the original on 4 December 2008. Retrieved 1 January 2008.Cite uses deprecated parameter
|deadurl=
(help) - ^Hruska, Joel (31 March 2008). 'Creative irate after modder spruces up Vista X-Fi drivers'. Ars Technica. Retrieved 18 January 2018.
- ^Walters, Chris (31 March 2008). 'Creative Sparks Customer Revolt When It Tries To Silence Third-Party Programmer'. The Consumerist. Retrieved 18 January 2018.
- ^Alexander, Carey (5 April 2008). 'Creative Backs Down, Reinstates Spurned Developer'. The Consumerist. Retrieved 18 January 2018.
- ^'Zii'. Archived from the original on 15 January 2009.Cite uses deprecated parameter
|deadurl=
(help) - ^'Creative's Zii 'Stemcell Computing' is not likely to be awesome'. Engadget.com. Retrieved 11 November 2010.
- ^'Creative unveils Zii'. Engadget.com. Retrieved 11 November 2010.
- ^'Creative to license technology and patents to Intel as part of a us$50 million deal'. Creative Technology Ltd. Archived from the original on 29 November 2012. Retrieved 19 November 2012.Cite uses deprecated parameter
|deadurl=
(help) - ^'Creative CEO: Super X-Fi audio tech more revolutionary than colour TV'. The New Paper. 19 March 2018. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
- ^'Creative Technology Ltd history'. Fundinguniverse. Retrieved 21 March 2019.
- ^Graham, Jefferson (28 June 2004). 'Creative's name describes CEO'. USA Today. Retrieved 31 March 2008.
- ^'ad lib | PC Perspective'. www.pcper.com.
- ^'Audio Made Clever :: What is SBX Pro Studio?'. Audio Made Clever. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
- ^'Press Relations'. www.creative.com. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Creative Technology. |
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