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Sony: The Crapware Con

Posted on 29 Oct 2009 at 14:33

Sony’s extensive range of software was responsible for the worst boot time of any of the laptops, with our sample machine taking more than three minutes to boot.

General application performance was hampered, too, with the VAIO exhibiting one of the biggest performance disparities in our 2D benchmarks: without any extra software running the VAIO scored 0.99, but it only ran at 0.92 with crapware enabled – an 8% drop in performance.

The installed software was something of a mixed bag. A small dock at the top of the screen can activate or turn off your PC’s wireless module or wired Ethernet connection, but compared to the options offered by the Dell’s dock the Sony is weak.

The Me & My VAIO suite is designed as a one-stop shop for organising, editing and viewing your pictures, movies and music, but in practice it’s more form over function.

All this software is a hard disk hog, occupying just over a gigabyte of space. Factor in third-party software, including McAfee Internet Security and Skype, and the Sony’s total is a hefty 1.3GB.

Poor boot times, poor performance and questionable usefulness mean that if you want a Sony laptop, you’d better be prepared to do a hefty crapware clean-up.

Rating: 2/6

(Model tested: VAIO VGN-NS30E/S)

(Illustrations by Lee Hasler)

Author: Mike Jennings