I was planning to buy a Sony VAIO and was looking for a corresponding model when I read an a blog article that Sony has disabled the hardware virtualization (VT) functionality of the Intel CPUs it sells with its notebooks, and the customer can not enable it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware-assisted_virtualization
Hardware virtualization is a wonderful CPU feature which helps “virtual computer” programs (like Sun’s VirtualBox) to run very fast. Those kind of programs let you load and use multiple operating systems on a single machine simultaneously – for example you run MS Vista and in a program window/s, inside a virtual computer program, you run Linux OS or/and Windows XP simultaneously, thus three OSs run simultaneously on one machine. Which in some cases is very useful – e.g. to isolate one environment from another for a virus protection. And without this CPU feature enabled the virtual computer programs run slowly.
What seems worse is that Sony seams to mislead its customers to believe that when they buy a VAIO, they will actually make use of that CPU functionality – hardware virtualization.
One can read here, how Sony advertises what CPU a VAIO has:
http://www.kb.sony.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=C1001443&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KNOWLEDGEARTICLES_1_1&dialogID=115324605&stateId=1 0 45720451
„…The vPro logo sticker on VAIO computers indicates that the computer meets the requirements for the following vPro features:
Intel Active Management Technology (AMT)
Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)
Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT)…“
Well, yes, the CPU does truly support hardware virtualization.
But Sony has disabled it and even has taken away from the customer the possibility to enable it. And in this way the computer actually does NOT support hardware virtualization, as claimed in the ad.
And what seems even worse – Sony doesn’t seem to inform its customers that actually they can not use that advertized functionality they buy, buying Intel’s CPU within a VAIO. And, according to shared experience on the web, when they call the support they are just informed that Sony has disabled it and has no plans to enable it in any of its computers.
It seams that now many people have realized that in some sense they were mislead to buy a VAIO, and now they want to return it back for a full refund, because it doesn’t meet what is expected from a notebook advertised to have a CPU which supports hardware virtualization.
See also:
http://digg.com/hardware/Sony_Please_enable_VT_Virtualization_on_the_VAIO_Series
