After spending some time (obviously not enough time) searching for a new laptop for the wife (and yes, a little for me) I settled on a Sony Vaio FW-139 that was on Best Buy’s outlet center. It had a newer Intel Core 2 Duo P8400, 3GB of ram, an ATI HD 34xx video card and a 16.4″ screen all for $849.
I ordered it on Sunday night and it was here on Wednesday, so far so good. It came with Vista 32 bit and I wanted to put Server 2008 64bit so I could run hyper-v. No problem I thought, I’ll just wipe it and install from scratch. I even followed the instructions to create a recovery dvd so I could restore the laptop to it’s factory state.
So I got Server 2008 64bit installed, and went to go look for drivers, and here is where I realized I made a mistake in picking out this laptop. I assumed that Sony would have 64bit drivers for this model, well they didn’t. I spent about 4 hours rounding up drivers and got just about everything working. Not a big deal I though, and it was my fault that I didn’t check on the driver situation first.
Went to fire up hyper-v and it said it couldn’t start because the VT flag was disabled. No problem right? Just reboot, go into the BIOS and…..wow, this is the most bare bones bios I have EVER seen. I can change the boot order and that’s it. Off to Google I went, and found out I was not alone. Sony disables the VT flag and does not give you an option to enable it. Some people have gotten creative and used a dos utility to edit the NVRAM directly, but the register you have to edit varies by model/bios.
I think someone said it’s listed in the fine print somewhere that the VT flag is disabled, but even if that’s true, I’m still calling BS on this. I’m not going to mess around with the NVRAM on a brand new computer for something that shouldn’t be disabled in the first place.
Tomorrow I will be going to Best Buy to hopefully return the Sony and start my search once again. I really liked that P8400 processor, as it runs at 25w instead of 35w, which is what the T5800 runs at (the T5800 is the most common processor in the price range I was looking at).
Given how much time I have spent researching, I think I might up my price to $1000 and hopefully save me some time. That should give me a few more options when looking for a laptop with a discrete video card as well.