Heads up re VM's & Intel 64bit Processors

[NoOp]

On 03/20/2010 05:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote:

>> On Saturday 20,March,2010 12:01 PM, NoOp wrote:
...
>>> Next stop; ark.intel.com&  what do I find... the T4300 is indeed a 64bit
>>> processor, *but* it doesn't support VT-x or Hyperthreading!
>>>
>>
>> Those are the two reasons why I keep my virtualization laptop for work
>> travel always an Athlon 64X2 based one.
>> Because buying the Intel one having the risk of either the processor
>> does not support VT-x or there is no option to enable it in the BIOS.
>>
>> However I consider myself quite lucky when I was given a Fujitsu S6520.
>> Initially it cannot enable the BIOS, but after BIOS upgrade, then I can
>> enable the VT-x.
> 
> Sadly no guarantee. My desktop is an AMD - Athlon X2 64 4400+, one of
> the last, best, fastest Socket 939 chips there were. The CPU supports
> AMD-V but there is no option to enable it in the BIOS so VirtualBox
> has to do without.
> 
> The BIOS is the latest one & as it's a 5YO motherboard, I expect no
> further upgrades. I had to upgrade it when I got it a few months back
> just to get the M/B to recognise 4GB of RAM - its ~2006/2007 BIOS only
> saw 3¼GB, i.e., the 32-bit ceiling.


When you next go shopping, you might want to burn a copy of the .iso
from this article and take with you. You can boot up the machine & it
will test to see if VT-x is working, or can be enabled:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8978
[Verifying that Intel VT-x is Enabled and Locked at Boot]
 Attachments:
    * vt.iso (538.0 K)
(bottom of the article)