I recently bought myself a Sony Vaio TZ-series laptop and was amazed at how a single product could result in such contrasting experiences.

Physically it’s everything I want from an ultraportable notebook: thin, light and sleek, with a superb screen and usable keyboard. To see it is to love it. But after powering up, the TZ could try the patience of a saint. Out of the box, its performance, frankly, sucks.

On the surface the problem appears to be a resource-hungry OS running on under-powered hardware. Windows Vista certainly has a bad reputation, with many frustrated laptop owners campaigning for Windows XP drivers to be made available for those who wish to make the switch to something less demanding. Sony relented and, if you’re interested, there are XP drivers for the TZ series on several of its websites.

But however much I’ve knocked Vista for its demanding nature and extolled the virtue of a nice, clean XP installation, something just didn’t ring true. The Vaio TZ may not be the world’s fastest notebook, but its hardware configuration is hardly poor. Even the cheapest model is equipped with a 1.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of Ram. Sure you can argue that Vista prefers 2GB and something quicker, but the TZ’s core specification should be able to run Microsoft’s latest OS just fine. So what’s the real problem?

One word: junk. It’s been a long time since I’ve tested a retail PC bought directly from a store. I admit my notebook was bought in the US, but as it struggled to start up I was shocked by the amount of pre-installed junk. Junk masquerading as valuable enhancements had turned a perfectly usable laptop into what appeared to be a woefully under-powered system.

The warning signs were plain to see on its desktop with no fewer than 10 shortcuts to promote various offers. Sony’s infamous for self-promotion, but surely preloading both the Spiderman 1 and 2 movies on a new notebook with a shortcut to ‘unlock’ them for a fee is a bit rich. Besides, if Sony saw it as an entertainment laptop, why install Vista Business?

My Vaio also had AOL and Sprint Wireless trials, a Microsoft Office tryout, and my personal bugbear, two months worth of Norton Internet Security – just long enough for most owners to become reliant and feel obliged to make a purchase when it expires. Then there was Corel Paint Shop Pro, Corel Snapfire, Napster and more besides. Firing up Vista’s Programs and Features Control Panel listed a considerable 96 items. Remember this was a machine that had just been switched on for the very first time.

It took more than six minutes before the Vaio was ready to use, and a minute and a half to shut down. All this software is pre-installed to give the impression of value, but most of it is little more than trials and adverts. How much do manufacturers get paid to pre-install these trials?

No wonder so many Vaio TZ owners have been vocal on forums about their disappointment, either returning them as unusable or taking the considerable effort to install XP instead. But Vista or modest hardware wasn’t the problem. Over-zealous marketing was.

While I was tempted to wipe my Vaio clean and start from scratch, I uninstalled the trials and unwanted programs, then reduced the startup items from a whopping 26 to eight essentials. This reduced the startup time to a minute and a half.

This was now the machine I’d ordered and one I was satisfied with – it even felt pretty quick. But I wonder about others who buy a computer and just accept its performance out the box. Maybe my US-based Vaio was a particularly bad offender, but trials and unnecessary startup items plague most new retail computers.
So if your new computer doesn’t seem as quick as you hoped, don’t immediately blame a modest hardware spec or Vista. Before upgrading any hardware or considering downgrading your OS, take a look at your installed programs and startup items. Just because it’s brand new doesn’t mean you won’t have some spring cleaning to do.

If you do finally decide an OS downgrade is the only answer, check out this month’s Hands On Hardware column on page 138 to see how I got on with XP on my Vaio TZ.

This article appeared in the June issue of PCW