Enable hidden hardware virtualization settings

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I am trying to get the Windows XP emulation up and running on my new Windows 7 Professional installation and I found out that you need to enable hardware virtualization.

I have a HP Media Center PC m7428n, I checked and it has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 processor which should be able to handle hardware virtualization, but the BIOS setup has no option for it. I checked around and most people have said the HP often hides certain BIOS settings.

Is there any way to get around this and enable it anyway?

Joshkunz

Posted 2009-10-11T06:14:47.483

Reputation: 560

Another side note: By now XP mode does not require hardware virtualization. – AndrejaKo – 2010-08-12T09:14:09.913

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Try running the SecurAble to determine whether your processor actually supports virtualization http://www.grc.com/securable.htm

– Josh Hunt – 2009-10-11T06:22:49.730

as a side note - this is one of the major things I hate about the brand-name PC market (HP, Dell, etc): you can't make changes that should be possible a lot of the time :-\ – warren – 2009-10-11T06:58:05.273

Answers

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Although many sources claim that virtualization works on your model, it's not an absolute certainity.

According to wikipedia, the Athlon 64 X2 4200+ has two models with part numbers ADA4200DAA5BV or ADA4200BVBOX. This seems to be a confusion - there seems to be only a single model.

The site products.amd.com elaborates some more, detailing both the above numbers, but calling them rather OPN Tray ADA4200DAA5BV and OPN PIB ADA4200BVBOX. It also says "Virtualization : No".

To further verify the issue, you may use either SecurAble or Microsoft's Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool (made available by mydigitallife).

harrymc

Posted 2009-10-11T06:14:47.483

Reputation: 306 093

Ran the both of the Detection tools and both said that I had no hardware virtulization capabilty... thanks – Joshkunz – 2009-10-11T08:14:02.967

Try to use Microsoft's Virtual PC for creating the XP virtual machine. This product predates hardware virtualization and might work for you. – harrymc – 2009-10-11T09:45:47.150

Hmm... That is the exact program I am trying to run but sadly it requires hardware virtulization for windows 7 – Joshkunz – 2009-10-11T17:06:00.227

Have you tried http://www.virtualbox.org/ ?

– harrymc – 2009-10-11T18:47:44.903

yea, but not the same thing sadly, I was hopeing to use the built in hardware virtulization but otherwise I can just use vm, However i have used virtual box before and it is pretty amazeing – Joshkunz – 2009-10-11T23:40:30.553

I've seen some benchmarks suggesting that the performance of hardware-assisted and software-only virtualization are not very different. – Ryan C. Thompson – 2009-11-13T02:18:17.207

Asked: 2009-10-11T06:14:47.483

Viewed: 9 875 times

Active: 2010-08-12T09:09:01.597