Stories like this just make me love my Mac even more

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9900516-1.html

Sony's really got some big ones to try to pull off the things they do. What kind of nut would actually pay for this??

Also, just saw another great innovative banner Ad from Apple on Cnet's main page. I don't usually tell people to check out ads, much look at them myself, but it's hilarious.

My mother-in-law just got a new Toshiba laptop and is so frustrated by the length of time it takes to boot up (Vista of course!) that she is having Vista replaced with a clean, bloat free, install of XP!

Perhaps we can all earn 50 bucks off new vista owners by clearing up their PCs

When I used to buy Dells the first thing I'd do when I took them out of the box is reformat the HD and install the OS without all of the extra crap. Now, I'm sure they give you some silly restore disk where all you can do is restore their image.

Fresh Start (removal of specific VAIO® applications, trial software and games) [add $49.99]
Opt for a Fresh Start? and your VAIO PC will undergo a system optimization service where specific VAIO applications, trial software and games are removed from your unit prior to shipment. Fresh Start safely scrubs your PC to free up valuable hard drive space and conserve memory and processing power while maximizing overall system performance right from the start.

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Uh, shouldn't a new pc come cleaned and optimized out of the box? This is basicly saying hey give us 50 bucks so your computer will work. This is why I build my own PC's and buy Macs.

Sony is the most innocent of the lot. The crapware that comes with HP, Acer and the others is just plain mindblowing! Extremely happy to be a mac user.

goobimama said:

Sony is the most innocent of the lot. The crapware that comes with HP, Acer and the others is just plain mindblowing! Extremely happy to be a mac user.

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Very true. A friend of mine bought a Compaq Craptop (extremely low-end). Although I tried to convince him to buy a Mac, there's just no arguing against a $400 laptop. In his mind, the thing is disposable if it doesn't last more than a year or two.

Anyway, it came preloaded with Vista and every bit of crapware you can think of. It only had 512MB of RAM, so as you might imagine, it was basically useless out of the box. We're talking about 5-8 minutes to get fully booted up - even then, it was ridiculously slow and basically useless.

The good thing is that we were able to format it clean and pop a copy of XP on it (after some fighting with the SATA controller and XP setup) - believe it or not, it's not a bad little machine now (OK, still craptastic, but it does the basic tasks just fine).

A bit over a year ago I needed a Windows laptop for some of my network jobs to test out things that only run on Windows and such. I purchased a Compaq Persario laptop with a 64-Bit AMD CPU and 512 Megs RAM and very nice Wide Screen LCD. At the time it was with tax $1300. The thing took minutes to get to the desktop even though it was XP Home SP2. Once there I found Amazing amounts of JUNK software and most of it loading up at startup! Poor machine was being strangled to death by all of it. First thing I did was uninstall all of it and it was then very fast. I also killed the trial of Norton and went with AntiVir. Takes so much less resources than Norton.

Most Compaqs at the time came with a restore CD but I was lucky as mine came with a Full Install of XP Home SP2. So I started up with the XP CD and did a fresh install. Now it's a nice machine and with the RAM at 1GB, XP flies. I consider myself VERY fortunate they gave me a real Windows CD and not some Restore! The Applications were on a 2nd CD you installed later and it actually let you select what you wanted installed!

Wow, they have some major kahunas to actually charge more for that.

Thats ridiculous. When I got my Vista laptop I had to spend about 20 minutes just uninstalling programs. Microsoft office trial,AOL Crud, and a whole bunch of HP junk. I commend Apple for not bogging down there systems with this kind of junk


Thats a very funny ad. I wont spoil it

mac0s9user said:

Thats ridiculous. When I got my Vista laptop I had to spend about 20 minutes just uninstalling programs. Microsoft office trial,AOL Crud, and a whole bunch of HP junk. I commend Apple for not bogging down there systems with this kind of junk


Thats a very funny ad. I wont spoil it

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Same here. I got a Gateway Laptop with Vista back in December (only hung onto for three days). Yes...it was that good. lol I spent a while removing the random programs they included with it.

Holy Shnikeys Batman it's Tyler Durden!! lol, anyone read the update at the top of the article? Sony got rid of the charge... so now you can decide if you want a crappy new computer that runs like it's 2 years old or a new one that runs like... well new, for free!

The Vindicat3d said:

Holy Shnikeys Batman it's Tyler Durden!! lol, anyone read the update at the top of the article? Sony got rid of the charge... so now you can decide if you want a crappy new computer that runs like it's 2 years old or a new one that runs like... well new, for free!

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Haha I laughed out loud when I saw that, nicee!

The Vindicat3d said:

anyone read the update at the top of the article? Sony got rid of the charge...

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Wow, they must have gotten some serious hate-mail. Still, I wonder if they uninstall it after it's already installed, leaving a bunch of leftover crap in the registry and whatnot, or they just don't install it to begin with.

Reminds me of the crappy 'HP Software Idiot Balloon' which keeps popping up.