Does Acer Aspire 5951G support Virtualization (VT, Hyper-V, VMWare)? YES

I got a great deal on a Acer 15 inch laptop (5951).  As this laptop has 4 SoDIMM slots it can support up to 16 GB of RAM.  Combining with a SSD makes this a great lab machine for less than $850 all in.

The major problem I had was trying to determine if Acer had enabled VT be default.

Booting into the BIOS in the store I couldn't find any settings to enable VT.  A quick google showed that many (?) other vendors close off parts of the BIOS.

Finding this link: http://marcansoft.com/blog/2009/06/enabling-intel-vt-on-the-aspire-8930g  -

Enabling Intel VT on the Aspire 8930G (and other InsydeH2O-based laptops) showed it was possible...Although I'd have to do some assembly programming.  I figured I did so well in the Microsoft Assembly course 7 or 8 years ago (I kept up for the first day - which I was told was the review part, then became completely lost as the dev monkeys went off on which HEAP manager was better) that this wouldn't be a major problem.

Doing something I don't normally do, I figured I would test the system first to see if VT was enabled by default.  Using the VMWare VT testing ISO it looked like it was.  I then loaded Windows 2008 R2 on and things looked good...Too good.

When I went to launch the first VM i got a ERRORS:

Event ID: 3430 & 3040

Source Hyper-V-Worker

'DC01' failed to set/change partition property: The system cannot find message text for message number 0xDC01 in the message file for B8CD1409-2147-453F-97FE-D00A6167DF8B. '0x8007013D'

This seemed very familiar...Looking back in my notes I found a reference to this on my Dell from earlier this year.

You cannot start virtual machines on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 and on which a CPU is installed that supports the AVX feature - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2517374 things were back on track.

Not sure why windows update didn't install it...I believe I've rebuilt my Dell since the spring and haven't had to re-install this hot fix.

Hope this helps someone else.