No Windows 7 XP Mode For Sony Vaio Z Owners

Voyager529 writes "While virtually every Core 2 Duo processor supports the hardware virtualization technology that powers the Windows 7 XP Mode, The Register UK reports that the Core 2 Duo processors in the Sony Vaio Z series laptops had the virtualization features intentionally crippled in the BIOS. Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert stated that the QA engineers did this to make the systems more resilient against malicious code. He also stated that while they are considering enabling VT in some laptop models due to the backlash, the Z series are not among those being retrofitted."

Comments

Sony has ALWAYS Gimped laptops...

[nweaver]

Back in 2000, when Win2K was out and happy but the proles were stuck with Win98/ME, I decided I wanted a laptop.

There was a cheap Sony laptop with Win98/ME on it that looked good to me and was on sale. I checked, there was a version of the same laptop with Win2K available, but it was a few hundred dollars more if you could FIND it, and the UC CS dept had a site liscence/arrangement for Win2K.

So I figured, why not? Buy it at fry's, reinstall with a remotely tolerable Windows OS, be happy.

Get the laptop, blow away the Win98/ME crap, put on Win2K, only to find out that Sony locks all the drivers with BIOS strings and the like so the drivers from the Win2K version won't install on any other notebook, even when the chipsets and everything are identical!

Fortunately, Fry's had a good return policy. So rather than going hunting for manufacturer sites for drivers, I said, screw it, popped in the reimage disk, and restored it and returned it.

A few weeks later, I bought an IBM notebook off a friend with PowerBook envy, much prefering the IBM site wher you put in the model # on the bottom and you get every driver for every OS variant, including Linux, in a nice neat grid...

But even nearly a decade ago, Sony was gimping their laptops badly. Glad to see they are keeping THAT tradition alive...

Re:What? Malicious code??

[TheRaven64]

There are a few proof-of-concept rootkits that work by installing a thin hypervisor in hyperprivileged mode and letting the OS carry on in ring-0, accessing hardware directly but being completely exposed to any code running in the hypervisor. This is virtually undetectable to the OS, so it makes sense to disable VT-x in the BIOS and enable it only when the user knowingly installs a hypervisor. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to not permit the user to enable it though.