I recently joined a new company and as part of that received my new laptop, a Sony Vaio VGN-SR46MD with AMI APTIO Bios, Core 2 Duo 2.53Ghz Processor, 4 GB RAM and 320 GB Hard disk. This was pretty exciting for me since this is obviously a reasonably good spec notebook and I would be able to run some VM's on it for my own R&D as well as client demonstrations... At least so I thought.

The problem I soon encountered is that Sony, in their infinite wisdom, release these nice beafy notebooks which are fully capable of achieving some form of virtualization with the Intel VT (Hardware Assist Virtualization) feature disabled by default and the BIOS locked down so that you cannot enable it. Way-to-Go Sony!

A couple of days of Internet Searches pointed me to various forums talking about the issue and offering resolutions with manual BIOS hacks. I tried to run through some of them but was having very limmited success, that is, until I came accross this post on the Notebook Review Forums where a user called levicki has come up with a BIOS Patch, downloadable froom his website.

Needless to say, I took the risk, downloaded the patch, ran it and am now able to run Virtual PC on my Windows 7 Notebook.

Thanks livicki, your work will surely help thousands of Vaio users out there.

Note: This will not work for the Sony Vaio's with the H20 logo on the Vaio Boot Screen.