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I am using Windows XP 32-bit and have an Intel Pentium M 725 processor.

I used a software tool from Intel to check whether virtualization is allowed:

Supporting advaced Intel processor technologies
Intel(R) Virtualization technologies                       No

How do I enable virtualization for this processor?

Indrek
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Santhosh
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  • You can't your processor does not support it. – Ramhound Mar 08 '14 at 13:15
  • So what is the solution, should i change my processor – Santhosh Mar 08 '14 at 13:34
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    You should be able to run virtual machines even without VT-x, but performance will be lousy (even if your CPU wasn't 10 years old at this point). If you know you need hardware-assisted virtualisation, then yes, you'll have to upgrade your processor, and quite possibly your motherboard as well. – Indrek Mar 08 '14 at 13:36
  • You can, technically, run a virtual processor on any system. It's just that on some it must be done by simulating large numbers of instructions, and hence operation is inefficient (and, perhaps more significantly the VM is hard to write). It all boils down to whether you can find a VM product that runs on your box (assuming you don't want to write your own). – Daniel R Hicks Mar 08 '14 at 13:51
  • i am planning to run androvm as guest. it always says init untraced – Santhosh Mar 08 '14 at 13:54
  • Your decision to change the processor is entirely up to you. Of course you have mobile processor so an upgrade is unlikely even if that product line was not EOL – Ramhound Mar 08 '14 at 13:59

1 Answers1

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VMWare, for example, was around before hardware virtualization was common on desktop computers. So was QEmu as another example.

What happens here is that VMWare/QEmu would emulate the virtual CPU and hardware, instead of virtualizing it. This is much slower.

Neither VMware nor QEmu currently support running on a system without hardware virtualization (I could be wrong about VMware but I doubt it).

However, older versions of these programs (probably very old at this point) may work, if you can find them. I remember being unable to run VMWare Workstation on a 533Mhz AMD K6-2 Compaq due to lack of proper SSE support, but was able to on a built 1.3Ghz AMD Duron system. (I will tell you VMWare with 256MB of RAM is not pretty). I forget the specific versions involved but it did work. Barely.

You may have problems running Windows Vista or 7 under them, though.

To actually answer your question, if your processor doesn't support hardware virtualization, you can't enable it. If you have a crappy BIOS that disables it even though the system is capable of it, I have heard of BIOS mods that allow it to be enabled. However, your CPU physically does not have the feature so you are out of luck.

LawrenceC
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