win7newlogoThis news is probably going to hurt all those readers who wanted to use Windows XP Mode on their Sony Notebooks. Sony has decided to disable hardware virtualization in their laptop collection. What this decision does is that it makes Windows XP mode in Windows 7 and other Virtual Machine  products such as VMware and Virtualbox useless. The reason behind this decision is because of security reaosns.An Executive at Sony, Xavier Lauwaert said:

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.

Xavier also goes on to point out about the laptop series that will not be part of the VT-enabling effort.

the Z series will not be part of our VT-enabling effort. Indeed, we will focus on more recent models.

Sony has also said that they will be enabling support for hardware virtualization on certain laptops from the Vaio range. One can argue that XP mode is not something that was apparanetly going to be widely adopted so it doesn’t matter whether it is supported on Sony laptops or not. But the thing is that it is still sad for those users who wanted to experiment with this and other related features on their respective machines.