Sony Will Kill Your Parents, Call You An Orphan

It's more than $50. You also have to add Vista Biz, so you're really paying $150.

 there pretty horrible if it comes down to charging you a extra 50 dollars on top of there price to have a clean laptop when you get it

News:

HotHardware can neither confirm nor deny that Sony is considering letting you have the laptop for free if you let a Nigerian spammer sleep on your couch instead of emailing you every day.

lol, That was pretty funny, good one.

I think if you are inept enough to require Sony to do such a simple thing as remove crapware, then you almost deserve to pay for it. Since I am sure Sony makes a fair amount of money from infesting your system with this garbage I can understand why they would want to charge you for omitting it. However, I think it is disgusting that they bog down your performance with this junk in the first place. 

 it isnt hard to remove crapware just its the thought of them doing this that make me sick

 How does Sony market this install? I would think it would be listed as a lighter install designed to optimize performance. Logically, this would be directed at people who aren't very computer savvy, or the technologically challenged if you will. I would assume anyone who knows enough to recognize this crapware as a parasite on performance, would also be capable of removing it themselves, or at least know someone who could.

 All this junk actually has quite a noticeable effect on lowering performance. So in order to avoid having naive people think that Sony computers just run slower than equally spec'ed competitors they decided to offer a cleaner install. By doing this they are exploiting the ignorance of their customers. I can't think of anyone else who would opt for this "service", unless they were just extremely lazy and had money to waste. 

Like in the other thread:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=404 

It's ok.  Sony isn't the nicest company ever, but at least they decided not to go through with this. 

It's good to see it didn't take Sony long to come to there senses on this. Whoever proposed this in the first place should be fired. It all worked out well in the end though, because this spurred them to offer the option for free.

lets just say sony has the best customer disservice 

Working at best buy....and setting up a lot of new PCs...I can tell you that bar-none Sony's have the most crap that comes preloaded on them; Toshiba, HP, gateway/emachine, Acer, apple have nothing close. HP is probably 2nd place in this list but sheez....

$50 seems excessive however but I do guarantee that if the policy called for like $20 customers would be all over it (as sad as that is). Haha its kind of like sony putting up advertisements saying "Here buy a sony they rock!!" and then subsequently selling t-shirts saying "I hate what sony does" Obviously they KNOW that they throw a lot of crap on there and are trying to appeal to those that know this as well.

I understand the offer was revoked but just the fact that Sony even thought about this shows they are aware of the ton of crap they put on their PCs so why don't they quit getting handouts from 3rd parties and quit making redundant software to put on their machines and just make the end-consumer happier?

The answer? BECAUSE THEY ARE SONY!!

i heard they got rid of the fee  

Like most of us here I'm sure, I build my own rigs.When I buy a new laptop, or even before I started building my own rigs, the first thing I do is a clean install of windows. Format and xp pro goes in. I do the same thing when a family member buys a new machine. It's just easier then uninstalling all that crap that comes on store bought pc's and laptops.