🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm sure I'm not the first person to complain about this, but the threads
only go back so far and I cna't find any references to it anywhere. I just
rebuilt my system with these specs:

PIII 850
Tyan Tiger 100 motherboard
512 Meg Ram
Diamond Viper 550 video Card
HP9310 CDRW
Creative Encore 12X w/DXR3 card
Soundblaster Live! Platinum 5.1 with LiveDrive II
Intel Ethernet card

Everything is in working order and I couldn't be happier with the
configuration! The DXR3 video leaves something to be desired, and I'm
interested in finding out more about the H+ drivers that everyone is talking
about, but will read for more information on that. So what am I complaining
about? Let's see, since installing the software that comes with all of my
wonderful toys, I've got about fifty creative programs running in the
background and popping up all over the place and fighting with each other
and with Windoze as to who is going to play what! I upgraded the remote
manager, and now all of a sudden I have this OnScreen remote that I have to
disable after every reboot! What the hell is this for? It's a graphical
representation of the remote and functions like the remote but I have the
remote so why put it on the screen, besides, if I'm sitting at my computer
why do I need the remote when everything is but a mouse click away in the
appropriate areas. How can I disable this permanently? That and every time I
put an audio CD into a drive, the deluxe CD player pops up, the Playcenter
player pops up, and then the remote player wants to play it also! My
computer is starting to remind me of our Federal government! While everyone
hates Mickey Soft, You have to give them credit for having integration down
pat! Creative, are you listening? Why are you giving me so many players and
hogging all my resources with your little monitoring programs and stuff. I'm
so over all of this system tray stuff. I don't even load my Anti virus Auto
protect anymore. If I let every little monitoring program run on all the
software I have installed, I end up with 65% resources to start with! By the
time I load one program, it's down to 50%! Okay, so here's the scoop. I like
the remotecenter, but it doesn't have the CDDB capability. That and the fact
that the minute I start an Audio CD, Creative thinks that I want to watch
their goofy little visualization while it's playing and automatically full
screens my desktop. I can't find out how to disable that. All I can find is
I have to go to the option of Switch back to desktop everytime! What a pain!
I haven't found out how to turn it off in MS's media player but when I do,
I'm turning it off there also. If I'm listening to a cd on my computer, it's
usually when I want to do something else on there and don't have time to
watch the pretty colors, if I'm not on the computer and just using it as a
player, the last thing I'm doing is looking at the pretty colors! I feel
like I've been thrown back into the sixties and forced on bad acid trips!
Next is this disk detector stuff. It's built into windoze, why does creative
think they need to reinvent it? Why not play nicely together and just
integrate into Windows with file associations? Okay, I know how to disable
Audio HQ from starting up, but wouldn't it be easier to integrate that
control into windows volume control without running another six applets?
Nice little buttons on the Audio properties like the advanced settings. I
don't use my EAX settings when I'm listening to music so I had to unload the
autoEAX that creative tried to load also. I love it in the games but very
seldom am I sitting at my computer trying to recreate a concert hall! Not
saying it's not fun at times to play with but usually, it's the last thing I
think about (usually I'm sitting there in my financial program trying to
figure out how much money I've spent on this stuff!). Okay, whenever I put a
DVD into the drive, I have two creative programs trying to decide which is
going to play it. Disc detector detects it and tries to play one program and
the DVD player that came with the drive wants to play it also, and I usually
end up with a GPF between the two or a little "notice" that another program
has control of the drive and it never ends up playing until I go to the
Start menu and manually start the DVD from there. Then the remote doesn't
even integrate with the DVD player. Did something go awry in my installation
somewhere? I'd love to hear if you guys are as frustrated as I am about this
and what you have done to tame Creative's lust for resources and controls!

Thanks!

Bubba