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I have a Thinkpad T61p which is about 4 years old. It has a Core2 Duo T9300. I upgraded to Windows 8 intending to develop Windows Phone 8 apps. It turns out that the WP8 emulator requireds Hardware Assisted Virtualization and Second Level Address Translation. When I installed the WP8 SDK it said HAV is not enabled (even though it is, but I guess it's flaky as I've had that issue before). Then I found out about SLAT. I ran coreinfo and it says SLAT is not supported.

Doing a search turned up this about SLAT (EPT in Intel terms) in Wikipedia: Intel states that the feature is available in all their Nehalem-based CPUs with virtualization support; namely in Core i7, Core i5, Core i3, Pentium G6950 and appropriate Xeons. It is not available in Core 2-based and earlier Intel CPUs.

I guess that is that and my laptop can't develop WP8 apps (technically can, but can't run the emulator so there's really no point in trying unless I had a device, which I don't).

Now I plan to buy a new machine (laptop) and want to make sure it's going to meet all the requirements to develop WP8 apps on.

Any Windows Phone 8 developers care to recommend a machine or am I safe in getting any newer machine?

I guess what I'm trying to ask is are features like HAV, SLAT, DEP and Hyper-V inherently supported in all i3,i5 and i7 CPUs or should I be looking at other factors like the manufacturer/bios or other hardware?

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You will be OK if you get any Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 based machine as stated above. However, you may want consider a workaround that I am using.

I have a need to run VMWare on the primary desktop thus I can't enable Hyper-V at the same. The way around it was to:

  1. Install VMWare Workstation v9 on your host OS
  2. Install Windows 8 64-bit as a guest OS
  3. Enable virtualization in Hardware → Processors and select these settings:
    • preferred mode: Intel VT-x/EPT
    • virtualized Intel Vt-X - selected

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The rest is unchecked.

This will allow you to run the Windows 8 SDK/emulator in the VMWare instance.

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I had to purchase some hardware recently that supported hardware virtualization. The documents that I read got pretty deep and technical, but the overall message I got was that the virtualization has to be supported across the whole platform. So that would be mobo, buses, cpu, etc. The best advice I found was to ensure that you get a complete Intel package. Other manufacturers may support hardware virtualization, but Intel definitely does on its i3, i5, and i7 lines.

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