Digital Home Thoughts: Sony Charges $50 To Remove Crapware: Users Revolt, Sony Relents

"For $50, Sony is offering not to include the standard Vaio applications, trial software and games that it normally pre-installs onto its systems. This software usually has the effect of slowing a computer down, and has even led to reports of out-of-the-box crashes for Sony's Vaio laptops. The option, called "Fresh Start," is available on Sony's Vaio TZ2000 and Vaio TZ2500 laptops, but only appears if a customer also pays $100 to upgrade the operating system to Windows Vista Business from Vista Home Premium. Ostensibly, Sony believes only business users won't want the bloatware and will be willing pay to extra to have a clean system."

It wasn't long after this news broke that there was an uprising from their consumers and Sony backed off. In reading the various accounts of this, it is unclear if users can still ask for this option for free or if they are simply removing the so-called "Fresh Start" option from some models. I've personally always been partial to Dell PC's in this regard. Yes, they have crapware too, but they also come with a bare Windows installation CD and a system resources CD with all necessary drivers and third party apps required to get full functionality, like WinDVD, so as soon as I boot the machine and confirm that the hardware works well, I then format the hard drive and start clean. Too many other manufacturers, Sony included based on my last experience with a Vaio, simply include a system restore CD, which puts the crapware back on.

While this would show an unbelievable amount of chutzpah for other computer manufacturers, this didn't even surprise me coming from Sony. In fact, if I had read this story and no company names were mentioned, Sony is the first one that would have come to mind. I don't care how good some of their technology is, we simply don't own any of their products in our house, unless there is some alarm clock or old handheld radio still in use.