Owners of older Sony laptops shafted over Windows 7's 'Windows XP Mode'

It seems Sony laptop owners won’t be taking advantage of Windows 7’s ability to run old Windows XP applications — at least not until Sony makes a firm decision about enabling hardware processor virtualisation on its portables.

Sony disables the hardware processor virtualisation (VT technology) supported by certain Intel processors on its laptops for ' security reasons'. The technology allows PC virtualisation software like Virtual PC, VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop to run self-contained operating systems directly on the processor hardware rather than on a processor emulated in software. VT technology isn’t necessary for such software, but it can help it run much more smoothly.

The catch is that while Windows 7 won’t run all Windows XP applications, it will ship with ‘ Windows XP Mode ’. This is essentially a single-purpose PC virtualisation application for Windows XP — and it requires VT technology to be enabled. So, Sony laptop owners face a tough time if they upgrade to Windows 7.

While not exactly breaking news, the surprising state of Sony’s laptops with regard to Windows 7 was highlighted in a post by over at the Microsoft Windows 7 Partner Blog by Sony Senior Manager at Product Marketing, Xavier Lauwaert. He posted:

These last months we have been working with Microsoft to ensure that not only the operating system but also our PCs create a symbiotic effect whereby end user usage models are optimized. The end result is an improvement in day-to-day life performance as well as simply making the PC more fun to use. We live in a very PC-centric and connected world and Windows 7 addresses both these needs.

Windows 7 will provide new solutions and expectations and we look forward to leveraging this release on our platforms.

This drew the non-plussed comment from Sony laptop owner “Howard Durdle”:

Sony's decision to disable Virtualization Technology on the Intel chips on their high-end notebooks makes little sense when you consider that these machines are targeted at business consumers.   It was also annoying to find this out _after_ I had bought the machine, since none of the pre-sales literature mentioned it.

Even more so when you realise that Windows 7 will include a virtual Windows XP installation to provide backwards compatibility. This will run with impaired performance on any Sony laptop where VT has been disabled. I would be interested to know what the Windows 7 team think about Sony crippling their customer’s ability to use their carefully constructed backwards compatibility feature?

Xavier Lauwaert replied:

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 t say that the Z series will not be part of our VT-enabling effort.

Indeed, we will focus on more recent models.

The thread contains more angry comments from other Sony laptop owners, but although it seems that Sony will be revisiting its decision to disable VT technology, it won’t do so for all models. Fortunately, VT technology can be manually enabled on some Sony laptops.

[vi Gizmodo]