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    Anyone experienced Sony "Fresh start"??

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by phoebusvh, Sep 3, 2008.

  1. phoebusvh

    phoebusvh Notebook Consultant

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    Eventhough getting Vista Business is an extra of $50, the total cost for "Fresh start" is only $20 since Sony take off several $5ish for not installing those bloatware. Is it really worth the extra $20?
     
  2. DetlevCM

    DetlevCM Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    I doubt it.
    I mean, unless they take of things like WinDVD.
    (That's unless you have a DVD playing software)
    You can get trials or google stuff (I got rid of it) for free.
    Basically, check what they leave out and if you will have to buy anything if you take the bloatware free option.
    If its only the trials, get rid of it and instal the "real stuff".
    My Antivirus is Kaspersky, I can only recommend it.
     
  3. plazmic

    plazmic Notebook Consultant

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    If you need the features of Vista Business and do not have your own copy of Ultimate or otherwise, the $20 bucks is worth it for the upgrade alone (it would be a requirement after all). The fresh start then would simply be an added bonus of saving you, or your IT team time and thus money. Probably more than $20 worth of time as well.

    That said, I'm not sure exactly what the Fresh Start removes / retains. With a fresh install of Ultimate, minimal hardware utilities actually running (no Intel hotkeys but all Sony and Z specific functionality), and NOD32 running I'm down to 57 processes and a 192MB kernel (Monolithic kernels bother me in this aspect : :rolleyes: :). Whereas, by removing ALL bloatware possible, and keeping the bare minimum Sony utilities on day one of having the unit, I was still at 72 processes and 1.4GB ram *ACTIVE*.

    So essentially, if Fresh Start is as minimalistic as my clean install, and you only need what Vista Business offers (I need mah MCE! :p) the $20 seems like its extremely well spent given the time it takes to do so manually.
     
  4. DetlevCM

    DetlevCM Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Plazmic,
    I was able to drop down to I think something like 67 processes.
    Oddly enough my SZ seems to run some processes and shuts them down afterwards.
    Another thing: You can get rid of some Microsoft services as well to increase performance.
    Right now I'm running on 70 processes, the following programs active:
    SonicStage, TaskManager, Firefox 3, QIP, MS Outlook

    (After cleaning up the "bloatware")