UPDATE: As of Friday afternoon (3/21), Sony has decided to offer "Fresh Start" for free. "Starting March 22, Sony will offer Fresh Start free of charge," a Sony spokesman said. "We want VAIO users to have the best experience possible with our PCs, and we believe Fresh Start will help ensure that happens right out-of-the-box." Power to the people!

Original post follows:

Do you hate all those annoying shovelware programs PC manufacturers lad on your machine before you buy it? Of course you do. And Sony, helpfully, is offering a "Fresh Start" option to remove all that pesky crapware. How nice! Yes, for $50, Sony will remove all the crapware programs... Wait, it says here that Sony will remove all of the programs it installed in the first place. Excuse me?!

So not only is Shovelsoft paying Sony to put those programs on in the first place, you get to pay Sony to remove them. So far, the program is being trialed on the Sony TZ2000 notebook.

Just another example of Sony's backwards customer service? At this point, yeah. Why couldn't they just eat the $50 and remove the software as a value-added service? Or offer it as a "bonus" for customers who bought another software package? In any case, way to turn a positive into a negative, Sony.