A little over a month ago, I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1545 from the Dell Refurbished shelf. Most of the systems I've purchased from Dell have been procured through this route, and I've been pretty happy with the systems.

Until now. Tonight, I was p0wned by MS.

See, I'd purchased the laptop to do Windows 7 forensic (and in particular Registry) research. You know, use it like a user would and then see what the system "looks like" from a forensic perspective. Do what a user would do, then do like a forensic nerd would do.

Well, it seems that the laptop I purchased is running an Intel T4200 processor. It has 410 Million transistors, but does not support hardware virtualization.

Okay, my thought was that I was going to get an almost-brand-spanking-new system...no way it wouldn't support hardware virtualization. Well, it doesn't. What this means is that this laptop doesn't support XP Mode. Wow, so much for that rather critical portion of research.

So, the lesson learned here is, don't assume that the latest and greatest box, even one birthed in the past year, is going to have the necessary functionality to support what you want to do. In fact, as far as XP Mode is concerned, if that system you've got your eye on has an Intel processor, assume that it doesn't until proven otherwise. Wonder where I got that? My favorite forensics tool, Cory Altheide, found this at the Parallels site...notice what it says at the bottom of the page about AMD microprocessors.

Addendum: It seems that while the laptop I just purchased does not have a processor that supports hardware virtualization, the Dell Latitude D820 that I purchased in 2006 DOES! All I need to do is enable it in the BIOS...