Sony VAIO TZ: a portable crapware-house?
This is a tragic shame. Jenn K. Lee of Pocketables bought her first Vista device: the small and light Sony VAIO TZ; that’s not the shame part though. ;) The shame is her first experience with her first Vista device: dealing with the crapware that Sony has included. With a 100 GB drive installed on the VAIO TZ, Jenn found only 62.3 GB free after her initial setup of the device. To be fair, Sony does include a recovery partition of 8 GB, but you should see her documented list of crapware included on the notebook. Once you see the list of items she removed, be sure to continue down for her first thoughts on Vista on this mobile device. You might be surprised!
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Yup, sad on Sony’s part… And, the buyer doesn’t even get any incentive from all that bloatware on the machine (by way of a rebate on the machine etc.)
On my UX 180, which only has a 30gig hard drive, over 6gigs was filled with bloat! However, there are plenty of sites out there that tell one how to delete and rebuild both the primary and secondary partitions safely, and without the bloat.
First thing I did when I got my new Gateway Vista laptop was start removing crapware. The second thing I did (after wasting more time than I should have on the “first thing”) was to re-format the C: drive, delete the Restore partition (I regained 10 GB), combine everything into one large partition, and re-install Vista from scratch.
After a day or so of trying to locate all of the junk (they don’t necessarily install stuff, a lot of it is just “preloaded,” scattered throughout the hard drive, and reached via various desktop or Start Menu links, so you have to really dig around), I decided to blow the whole thing away and start from scratch — it was actually easier than mucking around with crapware. Fortunately, Gateway includes a full Vista install DVD (in addition to a Restore partition, which you can transfer to a DVD), so you can re-install Vista yourself (from scratch, not just back to the original OEM crapware configuration).