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Sony blocks virtual XP mode

by on10 August 2009

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Vaio can't do it


Sony Vaio
laptops can't run Window's 7's much vaunted Windows XP virtual mode The Vaio's are shipping with a BIOS which makes virtualisation impossible. Sony has not said that it will enable the feature in the future.

According to Sony Insider the company claims that it has received very little if any requests to enable VT technology. Its engineers and QA people were very concerned that enabling VT would expose our systems to malicious code that could go very in the Operating System structure of the PC and completely disable it, he said.

A few people are rumbling on bulletin boards about class actions and refunds as it is not clear in Sony's advertising that the Vaio machines are unable to work with a core feature of the Core 2 Duo chips they ship with.

Apparently the feature can be re-enabled by booting from a DOS disk and manually modifying the BIOS. This is considered advanced and technical task which Sony claims could cause security problems.

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