Sony's Crapware Incident: The Right Idea Gone Terribly Wrong

[Guest]

Opinion - Given by the speed Sony reacted to the outrage over the company's fee for removing crapware from one of its notebooks, I am pretty sure that the marketing folks are still trying to figure out what hit them and where this enormous wave of complaints came from.

Sony's Crapware Incident: The Right Idea Gone Terribly Wrong : Read more

 

[Guest]

> I am all for a crapware removal fee.

And I am for not installing crapware in the first place (in case no one noticed, removing crapware is doing double work), and let the customer select crapware during the configuration part of online ordering if they wish. In this way the crapware authors only give Vista a black eye, causing frustration with operating system features that don't work because some 3rd party crapplet was not tested well enough, and ultimately leading to reinstalling the OS as the fastest way of getting rid of it. Nevermind the price tag of the computer ($500 or $1,500), the computer retailer industry is looking strangely familiar to cell phone companies, which keeps them above only slightly more prestigious than used car salesmen.

 

[fuser]

I love this line of thinking ... I bought a notebook without doing any research, got a crappy early edition, had trouble with an incompatible driver, so I decide to buy a Mac.

$50 or $100 for crapware removal? Um, no. Add/Remove Programs works just fine. Unless, in this economy, you're still willing to pay someone $100-$200/hr to save you a few minutes.

 

[fuser]

FWIW, I bought an HP notebook last summer and I don't recall much crapware and the computer works beautifully. Then again, I read reviews, compared it with similar models and did some planning before I spent $1000.

 

[Guest]

I bought the same HP tx1000 as soon as it was introduced in Singapore. I was thrilled at the store, to find a $1000 machine offering touch screen and writing facilities. I went home with it and suffered almost the same plight in setting up everything. I even lost some drivers and had to download some from the net and then the touch screen and screen rotation functions went funny. Ultimately I formatted the whole thing and loaded XPSP2. Now it is OK. After some research, found that it did NOT have the minimum amount of RAM required for Vista! (was actually less than 1GB). But this is not my main complaint, which is the terrible heat that the laptop generates. Even a hard board below the laptop does not completely prevent it from burning my thinghs during long flight journeys. I have never seen any other laptop which generates so much heat, that also venting all of it to a particular corner. To sum up, all those who bought this snail-slow-volcano, deserve a replacement laptop. REALLY. I hope HP listens. However, the physical build quality is excellent. Congrats to their mech. designers.