fail

Thank you Sony that is another reason for me not to buy laptops from you.

It's "DisableD"

Sounds to me like Sony's engineers and QA people don't really understand how VT works. I would think if this was that much of a threat, the OS vendors would not be supporting it. I really don't think Sony (who does nothing but assemble computer components into a working machine) really has any reason to control such a feature.

I hate sony since I bought a LCD-TV and it was not able to represent older system like SECAM and I was not able to watch my sat. receiver (foreigner sat. receiver) on the new sony tv. It's showed a Black&White picture
1 word to sony: Bollox

P.S.

yeaaah right! That's why all servers in the world using it !

Robbing people with their ultra expensive products that are purposely crippled.

This is the reason I don't like sony. It's not like they don't make decent products or technology, they have some great ones. They could Just give a rat's ass about their customers. I'm not sure however that is better then microsoft who often make faulty products and bend over backwards for the customer.

Not saying they are right or wrong, but I remember reading an article on one of the sites recently that was an interview with a Security Researcher that specialized in exploiting VM's to get below the operating systems and could place something below the hyper-visor on systems and render all forms of anti-virus, root-kit detection and security measures useless on the effected machine and in all virtual machines run on the machine or something along those lines. It got to be a boring read after a bit.

Well it would be easier for the Sony engineers and QA, there's less questions on them for people who might not use them in the first place. Before the XP mode of Win 7, there aren't any typical user apps that would use VT. For the apps that use VT, I think if you are a user that's going to use such apps I think you'd know how to get into the BIOS and change this setting.

This, from the company that was busted installing rootkits on their customer's PCs.

It doesn't matter if VT is harmless or not. They could build in simple BIOS option: enable/disable VT and users that want it will have choice to enable it! Simple as that. But forcing VT off is just insolently.

if only they had as much brains as talk

Haha... Sony do not want to pay the BIOS developer for the feature! That is all.

If they had VT on they would hike the price up 300 USD

from what I've understood, VT is disabled with no means to be enabled.

What it takes is a simple BIOS option to enable it and that's it.
No security compromise unless the user willingly enables VT

I was thinking the exact same thing. There is a whole lot worse things to have enabled then the VT.

i don't know that this is really anything more than a focus on their target audience... which would neither know wot VT is nor use it even if they did... i think the biggest user of XP Mode would be business users and i don't think they'd go for this particular line of laptops and sony stated they would enable it in certain models...

i think in the end.. anyone that would use this feature would have an idea of what to look for in a new laptop either way... so they would avoid the models that do not have this enabled. the rest would not know how to use it and would be confused by it. so is this really a problem in the end?

My Lenovo N100 laptop suffers from the same problem.
Why didn't microsoft just make VT extensions optional like they did with previous Virtual PC versions?

I wouldn't touch a Sony laptop with a five foot pole anyways so this isn't much of a bother for me. At least when Apple overcharges for their laptops they are built well.

Security?? Then install the Sony rootkit as well!

If there is an easy way to re-enable it, it is ok to disable by default. Even there are security issues, then it is user's choice.

Anyway, I will not buy a Sony laptop.

The real security issue with VT is that a key logger or other low-level security threat could run at a lower level than the OS and then virtualize the entire OS without any significant performance penalty. Key loggers and other malware running at that level are impossible to detect from within the OS and could present a huge security concern. That said, I do like the BIOS option to enable/disable it rather than forcing it to be off.

People forgetting how few home uers would ever need or even use VT?

Hell, what % of people have ever used Windows System Restore?

I own a sony laptop SR490 which was purchased a few weeks ago. The VT is disabled and there is no BIOS setting to enable or any means. I however enabled it by using a third party patch made by igor livicki. So even if sony doesn't officially release an update to enable it can be done on nearly all models by a third party patch.

You are looking at it the wrong way. Sony is turning-off a feature that already exists on the CPU, without much of a good reason (there is no security issue). Your argument is only valid if Sony was simply not using CPUs that supported VT (and therefore, was simply not providing the option, rather than purposefully disabling an option that is there). This was a conscious action by Sony, not an oversight because no one was using it. As a consumer, I don't care if I will use it or not, it's not Sony's decision to make.

why would anyone buy a sony anyway? Why buy from one of the companies with the worst business ethics and some of the worst/overpriced products? Not to mention they try to make most of their products proprietary. remember sony notebooks with custom ram? "oh wait, you mean my upgrade from 128 megs to 512 megs is going to cost me 260 dollars or more?" "what's that you say? other notebook memory only costs 20 dollars for the same upgrade?" SCREW SONY.

I got picked up my new Sony Vaio Z today... cost me a tonne, and its brand new and current.... Why arent they planning to support VT on the top of the line Z series. I need it... I need to run VT as a developer to use multiple OS's to develop on - DAMN U SONY.

Just goto
http://feature-enable.blogspot.com [...] -vaio.html

Sony had released a BIOS upgrade on some models already to enable the VT on the BIOS.

Where is the upgrade found I know of no such upgrade from Sony. It is possible to fix this issue using a zip file found at http://jbarton.virtualkingdoms.net/usbBoot.zip and http://blog.steelooper.com/2009/07 [...] -vaio.html

just make a usb boot disk using the files in the zip and then find your register information on steelopers blog

I am really disappointed that VT is turned off on Sony laptops. I was planning to replace my older VAIO with Z890. Called the US pre-sales support number. The Sony support person confirmed that VT is turned off for Z series laptops. He was not aware of any planned fix. I really do not understand this type of behavior. Does Sony think they can simply slide this by their customers or they simply ignored customer driven design? And what does Xavier Lauwaert mean when he mentions "In addition, our 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." (http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/partner/archive/2009/07/29/sony-executive-weighs-in-on-win7.aspx. Is Sony's engineering capability that weak? Are they not up to the design challenges or others (Toshiba, HP and Dell) are better in designing or less concerned about end user security? BTW, I have experienced design issues with VAIO laptops in the past: noisy fan, frequently failing HDD, less than optimal touch pad and inability to upgrade video drivers for ATI cards. What gives? Sony is walking away from "customer satisfaction", hallmark of great Japanese companies, altogether? Or disregarding "customer satisfaction and requirements" a new trend and strategy for new Sony with Howard Stringer at the helm?