Sony's $50 Crapware Fee, Killed Overnight

The $50 fee imposed by Sony for delivering clean-slated Vaio TZ notebooks to worldwide customers has been canceled overnight, and justified as an internal miscommunication.

Sony announced yesterday that users who want to purchase Vaio notebooks, in the TZ series that come with additional pre-installed software, have to pay an extra $50 fee to have them removed before the notebook leaves the factory.

Pre-installed software brings a lot of money to the major PC vendors and retailers, as they sign "installation pacts" with important software houses. In exchange of some money, PC vendors would install trial versions of miscellaneous software utilities.

According to Dell's CEO and founder Michael Dell, pre-installed crapware brings the vendor about $60 extra revenue per unit. Crapware is comprised of 60-day antivirus software, miscellaneous utilities and extra media players that would cease functioning after the evaluation period has expired.

Despite the $50 extra fee announced on its website, Sony officials claim that the "Fresh Start" option will be available to the user free of charge, but it will only apply to some selected models of laptops. This means that the company still relies on the additional revenue squeezed by installing bloating software from its partners.

Sony is currently shipping its Vaio TZ series of notebooks bundled with Microsoft Works SE 9.0, a 60-day trial version of Microsoft Office, Sony's Vaio Creation Suite Photo Software, a 30-day trial version of Corel Paint Shop Pro, WinDVD, and a free edition of QuickBooks Simple Start that can track maximum 20 customers.

Mike Abary, Sony's senior VP of the VAIO division, claims that the $50 fee was never intended to show up, but it has been accidentally applied as a result of internal miscommunication. However, don't expect it to be really free, because it is only available for some high-end models, and only after you pay some $100 to upgrade from the default Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows Vista Business Edition.