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HP Disables VT On Some Intel Laptops
snoukka writes "I just bought a new HP nx9420 laptop in order to use it with Linux, XEN, and windows on XEN. I was very disappointed when I noticed that the processor had this feature but VT is disabled in BIOS by HP and cannot be enabled! Disabled!? It's like buying a car with turbo and finding out after buying it that this turbo 'feature' was disabled." The forum thread goes back to last August and is still live. The latest post from an HP rep indicates that new firmware for the nx9420 should be available later this week in which the ability to switch on VT is enabled. It's not clear whether other HP products, in which VT was also disabled, will also get new firmware.
But will HP have to charge $4.99 for the VT compatible firmware in order to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act?
...just in time for you to play Duke Nukem Forever!
blah blah blah
What is VT? That'd be nice to know.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I gave VT to my wife... ;)
...on some of their newer Thinkpads. You'd think that when you're spending $2000 on a "business-class" laptop, you'd get it without any artificial limitations...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Enabling VT is a huge security risk with no benefit for most of HP's customers. You probably should be able to turn it on, but having it on leaves open the possibility that a rootkit could be installed as the hypervisor/VMM/whatever, making it undetectable to the OS. Even having the option seems dangerous, as many "power users" will probably enable everything in the BIOS they can, regardless of risk/reward. On second thought, there are probably only a few hundred people that would run Xen on their laptop, so why have the "bug" available on the other few hundred thousand laptops? I suspect there may be many legal reasons why it is disabled by default, whether or not disabling the option to turn it on was intentional or not.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
I tried to compare the perf difference with VT enabled & disabled using Virtual PC 2007 RC2 & Vmware Latest Beta.
I was pretty disappointed to find that there is no perf. difference with VT enabled or disabled.
At least they didn't just delete the post. *cough* apple *cough*
Artificial restrictions on hardware is an asinine thing, and given the fact that many people on Slashdot may have dealings with HP for servers/equipment, it's effectively news and a warning.
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I was born with two perfectly good nipples, each of which is perfectly capable of producing milk, but the feature was disabled with a few androgens.
Does this mean that HP will have to charge you for it like Apple?
Perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but http://freebios.sourceforge.net/ is a nice way to solve this problem. Then if VT doesn't work, you can fix it yourself.
Sony core 2 duo laptops, like my VGN-SZ340P, also do not have VT enabled in the BIOS. Supposedly the flag is still set in Linux, but windows needs the BIOS stuff for it to work right...
Sony will not comment on when this will be fixed.
> Our BIOS folks were instructed to lock it out without
> reason other than the fact that we don't test it.
Be like my company - just sell it, and the customers will tell you if anything's wrong.
Try searching around for "male lactation"
It's actually not uncommon. If you feel cheated, there are drugs you can take to enable this feature. Some models autoenable this feature for no reason.
Man, you really need that seminar!
"Victoria Terpsichore"
There, I'll take the big stack of money now...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
I've had bad experiences with HP laptops before. This was several years ago, so I may not remember everything correctly.
My HP Pavilion laptop had the USB controller on IRQ 11, but, according to 2 out of 3 BIOS tables, it was on IRQ 9. This caused USB not to work under Linux. HP and the BIOS vendor apparently weren't interested in fixing the issue, so, eventually, it was worked around with a patch to Linux. According to what I've heard, the USB controller worked under Windows, but would reset every 5 minutes.
Around the time the warranty expired (I don't recall if it was just before or just after), the cooling fan started to get stuck. This would result in it making an awful lot of noise, followed soon enough by the system shutting down, because of overheating. After several requests to various addresses and phone numbers at HP, they offered that I could send the laptop in for repair, and they'll put in a new fan and send it back to me. Unfortunately, the operation would have cost more money than it was worth to me.
Also, the socket where the power adapter connects to the laptop broke. I eventually figured out how to open the laptop, get everything out of the way to get to the socket, and put everything back together. However, I never really succeeded in fixing the socket. I tried everything from soldering to chewing gum, but it kept breaking again. Just before I decided to fix the adapter plug to the socket (thus hopefully keeping the two connected and in place), the hard disk finally got so many bad sectors that it couldn't be used anymore. I gave the laptop away to a friend who said he'd fix and sell it, but a week later I found it on the sidewalk, thrown out of the window.
All in all, I think I got about a year and a half out of the laptop. After that, I bought an iBook, which I just sold last summer, apparently still working perfectly after two years of heavy use (more than the HP was ever subjected to). Pleased with Apple, but not wanting to make the switch to the Macbook just yet, I got another iBook before they ran out. It will take quite some convincing to get me to buy HP again, and I have a lasting aversion of moving parts in computers.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Disabling VT isn't as bad as it seems, but it isn't very good. The V isn't used very much, and words with V in them could be substituted. But T? T is used everywhere. They should have disabled QX instead, since almost nothing uses those letters.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
If HP released this upgrade in functionality with a firmware update, would the previous article on /. entitled "Apple Charges For 802.11n, Blames Accounting Law" link - http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/16/ 2127204 violate the same Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Does anyone else anticipate paying for updates to get features that were originally promised?
http://www.vistahelpforum.com/
Windows Vista Help Forum
A little over a year ago I bought an HP laptop (I've forgotten the model) as a gift for my mother. First thing I did after getting it out of the box was wipe it clean of the pre-installed xp home edition and tons of advertising. With a new OS installed, I discovered that the processor, optical drive, and something else (I forget the 3rd item) were scaled down to barely functional speeds. After investigation, I discovered that those bits would not operate without specialized drivers that were not available for download. Further investigation suggests that the drivers may have existed for xp home only, even excluding pro.
Needless to say, the laptop was returned and I called alienware the next day.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
This is yet another Slashdot article that assumes too much. I don't think the average reader is going to know what "VT" is. I certainly don't. It shouldn't be necessary to click through a link to understand the gist of what this story is about. VT should be explained in the synopsis.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Just because people make up pretend security problems every time any "new" (in this case its actually quite old, just new to PCs) technology comes out to get attention for themselves, doesn't mean its true. There's nothing special about VT that creates any mythical security risk, nevermind a "huge" one. I guess HP should stop selling XP systems and go back to Me right? Damn those raw sockets destroying the internet.
I would laser-cut it on the silicon die if I could. VT actually brings nothing of value to the 99% of users, but it allows for the worst breed of viruses to virtualize themselves. I've heard last week on a Microsoft conference here in Europe about the issues here and I can say its all bad news from the security standpoint.
You confused HP for Apple Macintosh.
VT is not currently supported by Dell, either. There is no way to turn it on in any Dell system's BIOS, nor is there an ETA on a firmware update coming out to enable it.
To be honest though, it's one of those features you'd never notice is gone unless you were looking for it.
(Full disclosure for ethics: I work for Dell as a Gold Tech Support Agent. In my 5 months here at Dell, I've had only one call about Intel VT, which was -- in an odd quirk of fate -- just yesterday.)
But then the submitter wouldn't sound so cool in his own mind! There is a proportional relationship between self-importance and overuse of obscure acronyms that could mean just about anything. We should bow to the illiterate inadequate communication skills of such people, it clearly indicates their superior intelligence.
I, for one, welcome our illiterate, obscure acronym overusing, hyper intelligent overlords.
My seven year old Asus mainboard with six year old Award bios runs VMWare images of all kinds just fine. (it can also natively run just about any OS you can throw at it)
Virtualisation software that has specific "virtualisation technology" hardware requirements is pretty retarded, kind of defeats the whole purpose of it if you ask me.
HP has been slaughtering Phoenix bios for ages. Buy real hardware and you will find you have no software limitations.
Fisher is an HP employee.
That's:
IFOWO illiterate, OAO, HI overlords.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I have the same problem with my Gateway M255. Only gateway won't really give me any information about it. Here's a reply I got from them when i inquired if they planned on supporting it in the future: "Thank you for using Gateway's Online E-mail Support. If you want to know if when will the Intel Virtualization Technology be activated on your notebook, please note that we have no further information regarding this matter. If it is ready to be activated, Gateway will release information regarding it. For now, kindly wait for it to be released. If it is released, Gateway will support this feature." Very coherent grammar there eh?
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Clearly HP should ship all their machines with a "Turbo" button, that should solve everything.
I like music
I really don't think it assumes too much. This entire site is geared toward a demographic that has been following VT for some time.
Therefore, instead of complaining, you can...
Dell pulled this crap with the XPS 700, their 'enthusiast' line of computer. It took months of furious customers to get them to publish a BIOS with the ability to turn VT back on. They also did a lot of other really evil stuff like selling a gutted version of the nForce 590 chip'set' despite not saying it was gutted, ditto for the X-Fi soundcard (they removed the library that lets anything but Dell's music player play DTS audio).
You know, it's funny. *I* had a miserable experience with a Toshiba laptop and customer support (and CompUSA). So I vowed two things: never again CompUSA, and never again Toshiba laptops. I picked up an HP laptop (Pavilion dv4100) at Staples, and I've had a much, much better experience with that laptop and that store.
I guess I shouldn't extrapolate too much based on two data points, but for now HP and Staples have my business.
It's a sad day when "the average slashdot reader" knows more about the World Taekwondo Federation than the state of Vermont. jk lol rotflmao ?; >{o
As fas as my knowledge is concerned the VT enabled BIOS was not released earlier because VT feature was not tested thoroughly enough. When the VT feature came out in hardware, there was not enough software that took advantage of this feature to even test this thoroughly. The new BIOS, for the hardware that supports VT, should be out shortly to enable support for this feature.
Thanks to those of you who replied. I wasn't that interested in what VT is (I guessed in fact, correctly) - I was just trying to point out that OP is an idiot for using a UA.
However, the simple answer is to take the laptop back to the store and demand your money back. Simple.
If laws in the USA are similar to New Zealand, then inside the "Trades Description Act" or the "Sale of Goods Act" (or equivalent) there will be a paragraph which states "The goods must be of such a nature as to permit their intended use" or "Goods must be able to perform the tasks for which they are intended".
If HP has willingly disabled a feature on a chipset with a known feature, then they have violated the Sale Of Goods Act if a customer required VT as part of their purchase decision. There can be no argument about it whatsoever: the goods are NOT fit fo rthe purpose for which they were sold.
N.B. UA = Uncommon Acronym.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
One of the many reasons I don't buy HP products. Save yourself the trouble and go to another brand.
This is like a Bugs Bunny cartoon where they have a Daffy Duck is selling a push button modification house of the future and there is a red button that your not supposed to push but Elmer Fudd does push the red button and the button is for a Tsunami emergency which raises the house 100 feet into the air. Then Daffy in a helicopter is trying to sell Elmer a blue button to get him back down.
HP is not the first company to do this. Tivo did it last year and Apple is going to do this with it's newer Airport Extreme cards built into the newer MacBook and MacPros so can turn on 802.11n. These features are already in the device and your have bought them but the company needing to pad their pocket books are charging you again to turn on this built-in feature. This type of robbery should be illegal since you already paid for this once and now they are charging you again for something built-in.
Just think of the impact to the Redmond marketing group if they had to re-rename the current OS release back to 'Longhorn Professional'. Blood everywhere!
Thank you! It's new for nerds, stuff that matters. If you have no idea what VT is, you're obviously on the wrong website.
Which is not that the OP couldn't find the meaning of 'VT', but that it's a basic writing skill to define any acronyms or abbreviations the first time you use them.
I'm sure they know what Wikipedia is, they were merely pointing out an obvious problem with the story.
Read Pynchon.
I work as an HP repair tech (currently.) We've had HUNDREDS of laptops sent in for repair for this reason.
It's really sad how HP features things, but disables them. I had to repair a DV9000 with the webcam built-in, because the webcam wasn't seen.
The spot for the webcam to hook up wasn't even tere. HP had installed a de-featured board instead of a fully-featured board.
This is everyday at HP. Nothing to see here, move along.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As a long time Xen user and one of the very first non Xen developer to run hardware virtualized OS under Xen on Intel hardware, I can say something that most here are missing: if you install Xen as the hypervisor and then launch an unmodified OS, like Windows, using hardware virtualization (you ain't launching an unmodified OS under Xen without hardware virtualization anyway), the unmodified OS will *not* see a VT-capable system. Which means that if you install Xen in the first place, as a knowledgeable Xen/Linux user, it's gonna be *very* hard for a Windows virus to be able to attack Xen/Linux. You can run Xen under Xen (that's an indisputable fact, I've done it) but you fscking can NOT run an hardware virtualized system under another hardware virtualized system (that is another undisputable fact). Now conceptually there may be an workable exploit one day, but being able to attack the hypervisor from an OS seeing a non-VT system would be one heck of a hack (a bit like being able to crash a computer configured as a completely passive sniffer behind a one-way ethernet cable or a shomiti tap). In other words, it is very unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Moreover saying that an hypotetical "hypervisor exploit" would be undetectable is complete rubbish bullshit: it's not any more difficult to detect than to detect a root exploit. Anyone who consider that scanning a machine from itself is a safe way of detecting malware is a fool anyway. You take the system offline, hook it's hard disk to a known good system (or boot it using a live CD) and voila... Gameover rootkit, game over hypervisor "undetectable" malware.
(and if you want to play the "my servers can't be taken down" I'll fire back with a "what punk, you're telling me you've got a SPOF?").
What Xen buys you if you want, though, is free (from Linux) scanning / SHA1-summing / etc. of Windows systems without the Windows systems even *knowing* it is happening. Game over Windows "rootkits". Plain and simple.
I hope that by now you realize that if you run Xen/Linux then Windows under Xen using VT, it is *impossible* for a virus to act as the hypervisor and then to present you with a 'fake' Xen/Linux hypervisor that would allow you to run Windows. That's how VT in this day and Intel age works. It may change, but as of now: move along, nothing to see here.
(OK, OK, a *really* incredible virus could make you think you're running Windows using HVM though Windows would actually be running under QEMU... But that would be one heck of a hack and you'd notice QEMU's extreme slowness in emulation mode... No accelerated QEMU under Xen).
Hypervisor rootkits can't counter timing-attacks based detection either.
Windows running under Xen is way more secure than running on the bare metal. Dot.
So please, stop all the uninformed "oh my god VT is teh insecure tech!".
To me running Windows under Xen is the most secure thing that happened to Windows in ages (and, no, I wasn't that much of a VMWare fan).
The website pointed to by the article was down. I know of a lot of acronyms, but I only know of VT in terms of Dec VT terminals. Probably not what this is about.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
VT is the vertical tab.
Octal: 013
Decimal: 11
Hex: 0x0B
C escape: \v
It's the Control-K character.
When sent to the console, it seems to go down a line or two.
I can't see much use for VT.
Toshiba P105-9722 also has this issue, and I've come to believe that all Toshiba laptops have this issue as well.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Man, all those Virginia Tech students are going to be really pissed...
That is pretty much true. My reasoning is that the same could be said for most articles that Slashdot publishes. For example, ones that cite other computer technologies, such as numerous stories about PHP (what is PHP?) and linux (what is linux?). If this article assumes too much, then I guess most of the others do as well.
Acronyms are a way in which like minded people can quickly and efficiently communicate; countless businesses, academic institutions and social groups freely use acronyms as part of an established and understood vocabulary.
Except that in this case "VT" is not part of an established and understood vocabulary.
Of course, we wouldn't ask that question because everyone knows what HP is already. Why's that? Because this is a tech orientated site, of course.
This isn't really a good comparison. Even people without a technology background know what "HP" stands for.
I've been involved with and around computers and electronics since the late 1970s, and today is the first day in a long time that I've encountered the abbreviation "VT". It means "Video Terminal", right? Or is it "Video Tape"?
It's AEP (accepted editorial practice, but you knew that already, right?) to put the meaning of an abbreviation in parentheses next to its first use in a journalism piece, so you're sure the reader understands what you're talking about - unless you're writing an abbreviation knowledge test.
Putting moderation advice in your
Why do they even care??!?
To NH... I've had enough of people putting down VT.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
I guess the real question is whether or not this is covered under warranty, and if it is, would changing a factory setting void the warranty? Perhaps that's why it's disabled off the bat. I paid a few hundred more Canadian for my business model laptop this past summer, opting for HP's full coverage damage protection. (I think the only thing they don't cover is surge protection, which I have in my power bar.) From a business / "real world" perspective, they might not consider a product with a factory-disabled setting worthy of replacement under warranty.
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
It's nice to know that they're working on it, though, and they do have a preliminary solution for those of us who REALLY need it.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
"It's like buying a car with turbo and finding out after buying it that this turbo 'feature' was disabled."
isn't it more like buying a computer with turbo and finding out that the turbo 'feature' was disabled?
ôó
Since you seem to know something about the subject, would it be possible to enable the feature without waiting for another BIOS upgrade? Would it be possible to write an x86 assembly program that would just bit-twiddle the registers and switch it back on, at least until the system was rebooted and the BIOS set it back to disabled (presumably it does that each time) again?
... it's not like there's a shortage of x86 assembly-language programmers around (well, probably less of them now than 15 years ago, but still more than any other low-level language).
Seems like once the BIOS has done its job and gotten out of the way at boot, that you ought to be able to go in, provided that you're careful enough, and set things back to however you like. But then again, I've never seen this done, so perhaps there's a good reason why
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I noticed something similar with this Dell Inspiron E1405 laptop. It's got an Intel ICH7M chipset, and according to the following page, it's supposed to be possible to switch the SATA controller to AHCI mode, rather than legacy mode:
0 12304.htm
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/sb/cs-
However, there is no option to make this change in the BIOS, like people have reported with similar systems. So in Linux, I'm stuck with the PIIX driver instead of the AHCI driver. I'm not completely sure if there would be any practical benefit to using AHCI mode, but I do know that currently DMA isn't working correctly on the DVD drive, and my options are being artificially limited.
That's nothing. HP sold the ZV6000 laptops as "fully featured" amd64 laptops, but the BIOS disabled Dual Channel memory, and limited it to DDR333 unless you only used 1GB stick of DDR400. They also NEVER provided any x64 drivers for the machine. They also underclocked the Video card, and made the laptop downclock the memory by 5MHz when it was pluged into the outlet(why I will never understand). They also sold x4 DVD burners as x6 and their lightscribe drives had issues with writing CD's at advertised speed.
After that I will never buy another HP.
In the spirit of slashdotterie I will let you in on a secret:
It doesn't really hurt -- just a little prick.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
If that's true, it would certainly go a long way towards explaining why so many computers have it disabled (the article was about HP, I mentioned Lenovo, and somebody else in this thread claimed Sony was disabling it too).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Intel made some design errors in the original 386 architecture that made virtualization very difficult -- stuff like popf behaviour, and the design of its paging.
This caused emulator (virtulization) writers a lot of grief over the years (including me). But we muddle through with a combination of scanning/interpretation and native execution, eventually resulting in VMware. XEN didn't really count.
The chip architects apparently responded with changes that permitted virtualization. On the other hand, I didn't read up on the "latest and greatest". I just thought that they would learn from IBM virtualization (a lesson only 40ish years old), and implement an efficient self virtualization architecture that is able to again be self-virtualized. After all, we can contemplate an OS design that is purely a hypervisor; why not run that under another hypervisor? Isn't the point here not to worry about it?
And this simplifies the hypervisor and makes it more robust in a real sense. If things are implemented this way, there is never reason to support more than two guests under a single host. If you need more guests, simply run another copy of the hypervisor. This eliminates the need for most, if not all, dynamic memory allocation and most resource control, as well as the use of advanced data structures from the hypervisor. (And, I am not seriously suggesting 2, but a fixed limit can be imposed).
It would be useful (in the architecture) to specify that the hypervisor extension is not available, but this can be a function of the hypervisor itself (generate a trap instead, and disable the feature selection). In a sense, that was what I thought the OP problem was!
Unfortunately, I seem to be very much out of date here. I guess I have to study the Intel and AMD designs before buying/recommending processors for hypervisor use. And here I thought that this was a solved problem!
[and here I thought the fancy stuff would come from hypervisor->hypervisor virtualization punting.]
Your thoughts?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Really, XP Home only drivers?
I smell bullshit.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Actually, VT is required on the Intel chips (and Rev F chips seem to be required for Opteron) to run 64-bit VMs on VMWare Server. The free one.
I just replaced the CPUs (820's with 940's) in a pair of servers we use for lab virtualisation, to get 64-bit guest capability. The 820 is a dual core supporting EM64T, just not VT.
Mod parent +1! Would it really cause *physical pain* to the original poster to define WTF "VT" stands for somewhere in his posting???
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Geez you know that the preinstalled OS has all it's drivers on it's "restauration CD" and they are installed with the OS itself. HP doesn't give you the drivers on another CD. So you can't use them for any other windows version than the crappy preinstalled shit.
I've recently been looking at the new nw9440, which, I've noticed is substantially more expensive than the nw9420... and I've wondered why that should be. The specification is marginally higher - but that doesn't seem to be a valid justification for the price hike - to my mind at least...
Does the nw9440 resolve these problems?
They disabled Vermont in your BIOS? Can I disable Massachusetts?
nothing
I've been in computers for 20 years. Where I work, we have nondisclosure agreements with Intel and AMD, and I have seen presentations on the latest upcoming technology from both companies. They described virtualization in detail. When I read "VT" I had no idea what it stood for, and after reading a bit of the article I gathered it must refer to virtualization, but still didn't know what the "T" was until I saw the Wikipedia link. (When you think about it, putting "technology" in the acronym is pretty dumb. Everything in a computer is a "technology". We don't call memory RAMT.)
So am I a moron? I guess so.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You can buy barebone systems now. Usually you pick the chipset/cpu/screen, then fill in the ram, hard drive, and mini pci slots.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
I have many years of experience in the IT field and did not know what VT is.
Of course I could made informed guesses given the context, but it is just bad writing practice no to define acronyms of highly specialized terms.
You should not be defending such an obvious writing style fault.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The topic may be hot but the acronym isn't (I, as the other poster, have never seen it before, and this is from somebody that has VMware stuff in all my home machines and has been working on IT for far too long).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
At the risk of sounding vaguely troll-like, I'd like to point out that not having VT on your VT-capable CPU is in no way equivalent to a turbo car not having a working turbo. Poster has never driven a turbo car without a turbo and has picked a weird analogy out of thin air, which is generally a bad idea on Slashdot because people like me read it.
A better equivalent would be a dual core processor having a core disabled. THAT's the sort of performance hit you'd notice.
Okay, who else here thought there was a serial console in the bios? I thought the VT was refering to virtual terminal and I know I can't be the only one.
Not sure if you're calling bullshit on me or HP, but as I said, I found information on forum postings and support forums to suggest they were for XP Home only. I'm not sure I believe that, largely because I didn't believe that distinction was possible in the driver model (albeit entirely possible to code the drivers not to work on different editions). There were, in most of the printed material, many references to upgrading the operating system through HP, which is a good motive for building edition-specific drivers. If the machine won't work with a regularly purchased version of windows, it forces customers to go to HP to make that purchase. Geez, sounds like apple
I would maintain that having only a restore cd as a source and no website-available drivers means there's effectively no driver support. Just for completeness, my second attempt with the OS was to install Pro on top of Home, which didn't work...not that the upgrade path ever works worth a damn.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
You know Billy requires that if you build a machine that is Vista Compatible it MUST be non *nix compatible.
--
Its a conspiracy dude...
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
My new Dell Latitude D820 came with VT disabled in BIOS, but let me turn it on.
Why do we have to spoon feed you everything? Look stuff up, you'll get smarter for it.
Well, since Slashdot is a news site, it should follow at least some good writing practices. One of the things the author is suppose to do, is make the subject abundantly clear to the reader. Even HP should have been clarified. It could have been phrased as "Hardware manufacturer HP" or "Computer vendor HP".
But as we know, the editorial review process here doesn't exactly follow journalistic guidelines.
--- original artical ---
The forum thread goes back to last August and is still live. The latest post from an HP rep indicates that new firmware for the nx9420 should be available later this week in which the ability to switch on VT is enabled. It's not clear whether other HP products, in which VT was also disabled, will also get new firmware.
--- modified artical ---
An issue was uncovered in a Hewlett Packard (HP) message forum in August 2006, where several HP laptop owners found a key feature of their new Intel Core Duo chipset powered laptops, the Virtualization (VMX) or Virtuatualization Threading (VT), was disabled. This option, when enabled, allow for programs such as VMWare to take advantage of the new capabilities of the multi-core processors. This feature was noticable to Linux users, and will likely effect Microsoft Vista when it comes to market in the first quarter 2007.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
..nobody uses VTs anymore anyway. Everyone just uses X on vt7...geesh...
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I just don't see how it would be possible for a driver to be that version specific. Even if their crappy installer blocks the install in xp pro, you should always be able to grab the \system32 folder and just point device manager to that in your clean install (sometimes manufacturer's leave a config utility .exe or something in \windows too)
Just seemed kind of suspicious to me...
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
... which was Intel's codename for the Hypervisor extensions they added to the latest CPUs. AMD's version is called Pacifica and is, of course, different to Intel's way of doing it :-)
4 months old, no problems so far. :)
All in all, is a excellent machine. Very quiet, and ubuntu installs perfectly, in fact it recognizes all the devices (Including the TPM chip), something that even Windows XP fails to do.
I didn't realize the VT thingy, but is very important to me because i was planning on building a hypervisor myself some day.
So, thanks slashdot. I was going to become crazy debugging my app
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
"Journalism"? New here?
Liberty uber alles.
As yesterday, HP has a BIOS patch for my nx9420 (F19) that adds the infamous VT on Core Duos.
:)
It already feels more powerfull,
now lets make that rootkit...