Ed Bott has a great article on ZDNet on dealing with some of the headaches that get blamed on Vista when the root cause may in fact be CRAPWARE or lack of up-to-date drivers. He chronicles his experience in helping out a friend start from scratch on a new Sony Vaio that had been relegated to closet after the performance lagged beyond frustration. Ed walks through a number of steps he took along the way and the lessons learned along the way and the article is well worth a read.

Of course it raises the inevitable questions about CRAPWARE and OOBE. Sure, I realize that installing Trialware and such helps OEMs cut the price on new machines, but at what cost to the end user? And as the thesis of Ed’s article points to, it also takes a very, very high toll on Vista and Microsoft’s reputation as well. You’d think somewhere along the line, someone would see this and begin to restore some sanity to the madness, instead of backing users into restoring a new machine from scratch.