Sony explains why it disabled Intel VT in VAIO laptops
At the end of July virtualization.info highlighted how Sony intentionally disabled the Intel VT capability in all its VAIO laptops, making its expensive hardware useless for virtualization professionals and highly undesirable for every Microsoft customer that wants to upgrade to Windows 7.
Now this short-sighted strategy is causing the company a major image damage.
A week after virtualization.info published that article the story was republished by The Register (too bad they forgot to mention our post as the original news source), and immediately after by pretty much every major news outlet including:
- Engadget: Sony laptops can’t use Windows 7′s XP mode due to disabled hardware virtualization
- ZDNet: Sony kills virtualization on Vaio notebooks
- CNET: Sony nixes Windows 7′s XP virtualization mode for current Vaio laptops
- Tom’s Hardware: Sony Vaio Have VT Disable; No Win 7 XP Mode
- Gizmodo: Sony Laptops Have Hardware Virtualization Disabled, Can’t Run Windows 7′s XP Mode
- Neowin: Sony laptops disable Windows 7′s XP Mode
- Slashdot: No Windows 7 XP Mode For Sony Vaio Z Owners
To calm down the users Microsoft probably asked a Sony VAIO product manager, Xavier Lauwaert, to address the issue on the Windows Partner blog. His post says nothing but his answer to a specific comment about the lack of VT capability provides an astonishing explanation and fix roadmap (our emphasis):
Contrary to perceived opinion, we have 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.
Needless to say, the point is not if Sony is right or not about the risks related to malicious use of Intel VT (anyway, from a security standpoint they are deadly wrong).
The point is that Sony has to clearly advice that its VAIO laptops don’t support a CPU feature that is provided out-of-the-box by the CPU vendor. Without this information customers can’t make an informed choice and since the company doesn’t offer a way to circumvent the limitation this may be enough to start a class-action lawsuit.
The idea that Sony will re-enable Intel only on “selected models” and in future machines is ridiculous.
If a single upset customer was able to reverse engineer the VAIO BIOS and develop a patch to achieve the task, then the laptop manufactured and the CPU maker (cause Intel is to blame as much as Sony on this mess) should be able to release a firmware update without any problem.
And if not, they should recall the laptops it sold worldwide and replace the CPUs.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
May 9th, 2012
On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.
VIN automatically detects, discovers and…
May 8th, 2012
On May 3 VMware released a security update, that the company itself define as “accelerated“, with the purpose to patch five “critical” security issues across VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor…
May 7th, 2012
On May 3 VMware announced it has joined the Facebook Open Compute Project, an initiative launched in 2011, with the objective of increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impact…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress