Windows 7 Conexant Sound Card Issue

I am running the Windows 7 beta on my 4 year old Laptop, It’s not recommended but it does run well, using the Windows XP display and ethernet drivers it is a well functioning machine that doesn’t act much different from when it had Windows XP installed, however there is an odd issue with the sound card driver from Windows update that I will explain.

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Windows Vista Ultimate Extras

It seems many people are having problems with the Ultimate Extras that have been released by Microsoft in the past due to the low amount of Extras that were released and the time it takes for Microsoft to release them. Now it appears that everybody is at Microsoft’s throat again after the release of new extras that to many do not represent the kind of extras they were expecting when purchasing Windows Vista Ultimate.

New Sound Schemes

The sound schemes are quite similar to the original Vista sound schemes, after going through the sounds that were released I initially noticed that Pearl has way more sounds included than both the default sound scheme and Glass, why were these extra sounds left out of Glass? Personally I like Pearl and I am currently using it, however something tells me this is not the kind of thing most buyers of Vista Ultimate would actually use.

Dreamscene Content Pack 3

The Dreamscene Content Pack #3 however is a much needed boost of quality for the default Dreamscene content, even though there are only 3 in this pack their quality outperforms the previously released Dreamscenes both in content and actual picture quality, when paused there are no more pixilated images like you get when running vid8898 (the raining path) or vid8899 (the stream). I look forward to more content packs and wouldn’t mind it if some of the earlier ones were updated as well.

On the subject of Dreamscenes, as much as they are a "fancy feature" and don’t offer much in the way of directly improving productivity, I do feel that in a workplace they would probably do quite well in improving the overall working environment.

The most important point of all of this is that if you bought Windows Vista Ultimate for the extras then you bought it for the wrong reason and most likely did not need it in the first place. These are free extras that nobody paid for, it’s up to Microsoft when and if more get released.