Posted on Monday, August 10 2009 @ 15:49 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Register
reveals Sony VAIO notebooks won't be able to run the Windows XP mode in Windows 7 because Sony has deliberately blocked hardware virtualization in the BIOS of all current VAIO notebooks for security reasons. Sony said only select models will get a patch to activate virtualization technology on Intel's Core 2 Duo processors, which will surely piss off customers who just spend a lot of money on a new laptop that lacks a core feature of the Core 2 Duo CPUs they ship with.
Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert blogged that Sony had not enabled hardware virtualization due to "very little if any requests until recently."
He added Sony's engineers and QA people were: "Very concerned that enabling VT would expose our systems to malicious code that could go very deep in the Operating System structure of the PC and completely disable the latter."
