Not that I necessarily disagree with either of you, risky and foreverblast, but without knowing more about his diet habits over this period and FX on body composition, it's pretty hard to say for sure how effective the creatine has been...if he gained 4 pounds of body fat and 3 pounds of water, I'd say that the creatine isn't helping much...
I don't know a ton about creatine, but from the research I've done, it's probably gonna have a cell volumizing and water retention affect on just about everyone...but whether or not he's able to push himself harder in the gym is where he'd really be able to tell whether creatine is working for him, and from his comments, it doesn't sound like it is...Now of course, it could be the brand of creatine he's using or his cycling methodology, or a score of other factors, but my point is that a 7 lbs increase alone is not evidence of effectiveness.
In general, people on supps, need to understand how to control and measure the factors that could affect their bodily changes if they are trying to measure the efficacy of a given supplement. Too many times with these reports, people give only partial information about what they are doing, or they haven't established baselines, or controlled for certain factors, so it's really, really hard for us to determine whether or not things are working for them. I'm not saying everyone has to be a research scientist here, but you should probably have a basic understanding of research design and measurement if you are going to "experiment" on yourself with these supps. Otherwise, there is no real way to determine whether these things are having the reported effects on you that they claim.
Ok, I'm off my soapbox for now.....gotta go log some more shit in my 1-ad cycle diary...