Fans of Sony laptops who are looking forward to Windows 7 and the XP mode that will allow users to run legacy apps without fear of a Vista-like break will be sorely disappointed (putting it lightly) to hear that due to BS reasons that aren’t really that big of a concern security reasons, Sony has disabled hardware virtualization on all current Sony Vaio laptops meaning no XP mode for you. *Face palm*. According to Sony’s Xavier Lauwaert, Senior manager for product marketing:

…received very little if any requests to enable VT technology up until very recently.

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.

For these two reasons we have decided, until recently, not to enable VT. However, with the advent of XP Virtualization, there is impetus for us to relook at the situation and I can share with you that we will enable VT on select models.

Though, I fear to say that the Z series will not be part of our VT-enabling effort. Indeed, we will focus on more recent models.

Again, the immediate outlook doesn’t look to promising as Sony doesn’t appear to be in any hurry. While many users will in fact never need or want this feature, the crowd that has been looking forward to XP mode and all of its hair saving grace will no doubt need to start looking for a nice new wig pretty darn soon. What do you have to say about this unfortunate turn of events?

Of course, if you would like to give Sony the finger and re-enable the hidden pleasures for yourself, you can find info on how to do so with either a Phoenix BIOS or a Insyde H2O UEFI framework
Happy hacking!

Source: Gizmodo, Engadget, The Register, Image Source