Friday 22 January 2010

Buying a laptop? Make sure it supports VT

Just borrowed a colleague’s Toshiba M300/Intel Core2 Duo Mobile Processor P7350 laptop only to find the CPU doesn’t support VT (or the Intel Virtualization Technology/hardware-assisted virtualisation) required by Hyper-V and VMware; I was planning to use this laptop for Hyper-V-based demos. Rats.

The laptop in question is only six months old and otherwise nicely equipped with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive so it’s a shame about this niggle… back to Virtual PC and 32-bit for me I suppose—how quaint!

Which leads me this mental note: when buying a laptop go to extreme lengths to determine whether the CPU offers VT and do some Googling to determine whether it can actually be enabled in the BIOS (apparently the various manufacturers can disable/enable VT at their discretion).

In the P7350 case, Intel’s technical data was incorrect on publication—originally specifying support for VT. If you’ve actually got one of these and are reading this post, sorry mate—hope you weren’t planning to do too much 64-bit virtualisation!

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