My mother-in-law arrived in town last night. Our kids always look forward to visits from the grandparents. And I look forward to a few hours of free baby sitting! I hope she doesn’t read this.
Last night she asked for some help with her new Sony computer. It’s a gorgeous wide-screen laptop that she purchased at Costco running Windows Vista. It’s a fantastic machine. Except for one problem: It’s chock full of crapware.
I spent about an hour removing so many AOL programs and icons and toolbars that I lost track. It makes me think that the good people at Sony don’t give a hoot about the customer experience. This laptop has all the latest hardware yet it was very sluggish because of all the crapware that auto-starts and then takes up home in the system tray. Can you think of another device that costs well over $1000 that comes bogged down with a bunch of junk? I liken it to buying a new car that comes with two flat tires, sand in the gas tank and a bumper full of stickers advertising products I’ll never use.
From experience I know that Vista doesn’t need any help in running sluggishly. I was able to remove most of the crap and her computer is running better today.
Can anything be done about this problem or are margins so small in this industry that we can expect this type of behavior going forward?
Update: Dell now offering some machines without crap software
Nordquist Blog 