



Sony has quite the history of crippling excellent, beautiful hardware with horrible, useless software. The company's UX UMPC bluescreened on us the first time we turned it on, and crashed the first time we tried to shut it down thanks to all the bloatware on it, while a Laptop Mag review says their Vaio TZ ran " as if it were broken " before they managed to wipe it clean. Lucky for us, it appears Sony is finally seeing the error of its ways, but instead of removing the crapware altogether, Sony has the nerve to offer a $50 "Fresh Start" option, which "scrubs" the machine clean before shipping it your way. At the moment you can only configure the TZ2000 crapware-free, but hopefully Sony will be rolling out the choice to the rest of its laptops soon. Or here's an idea, Sony: stop trying to milk profits and start giving consumers laptops that actually work out of the box.[Thanks, Camron T]In case you missed it, it looks like Sony had a change of heart about Fresh Start . (What, already?)