virtual box settings issues

[loukingjr]

The wording is odd too, "VT-x only". Why "only"?

Out of curiosity I looked up some info. Apparently "VT-x Only" means no VT-d. Could that be the issue?

[mczakk]

thanks for your help guys

[mczakk]

one further question did spring to mind however, is this only an issue with virtual box, as the laptop came preinstalled with windows 8?

[mpack]

It is an implementation decision in VirtualBox. The devs have decided that putting work into supporting obsolete CPUs does not have a long term benefit in terms of paying customers, so new features (such as support for new OS's) will increasingly assume VT-x or AMD-v. A different VM platforms devteam may come to a different decision, though market reasoning will be the same for them.

[noteirak]

one further question did spring to mind however, is this only an issue with virtual box, as the laptop came preinstalled with windows 8?

The VT-x requirement is not a requirement of Windows 8, it is a requirement of VirtualBox to enable hypervisor features which allow to enable mandatary hardware features for Windows 8 to start.
So it will work on hardware because these features are there. And to provide them to the guest OS, you need VT-x.