Sony has decided to disable a key feature on laptops, to enable virtualization extensions. My laptop is one such laptop. Using various resources available on the internet (FreeDOS, symcmos.exe, and a list of firmware codes) – I was able to enable the VT-x extensions. Awesome.
For those Googling, my laptop model is Sony Vaio VGN-FZ140N. Firmware model: R0050J7. I modified the value ’02D3′ to ‘0001’ using the symcmos tool, and all is well.