k_nitin_r

Hello there!I've not been able to head out to the beach much but we had rain in Dubai a few days ago and I got to head out with my camera. For folks in Dubai, rain is a rare occurrence. The folks in Seattle would probably be less excited about the mention of rain. My photography is a hobby that I don't actively pursue. When the moment presents itself, I've got a pair of cameras packed away and another camera for videos. If there were a small event, I have enough cameras to get the whole coverage!BTW, does the hospital use tablets or handheld computing devices, now that they are more ubiquitous than ever?

I haven't been making large posts, but all the smaller ones added up, and I got my MyCENTs updated. If you haven't seen any updates, give it a few days and check back.

There's a video (click to follow the link) of a 10-year-old Indian driving a Ferrari. Obviously, it's without a license, and he drives it around with another child. Apparently, it is in Sobha City, Trissur, in the Indian state of Kerala. This isn't in an isolated area, but rather in a residential area where there are other kids playing on the streets too. The height of being filthy rich is when you hand over the keys of your Ferrari to a 10-year-old so he can drive it around.

There are some things that it does right and some things that it does. Learning TCP/IP does help to quite some extent and knowing how to use SSL certificates and how other protocols work would give one the foundational skills to setup and configure a firewall. Learning Linux, Unix, and Windows is so that one becomes aware of the various tools that are available with the operating system. A network administrator would be able to determine the IP address of a system and to figure out if DNS is working correctly. There are several cases of DNS poisoning that cause a user to go to a different website than intended. I don't really understand why they expect a programming language that is compatible with all operating systems - you can use just about any programming language and can expect some kind of a bridge or a port that will enable it to work on other operating systems. Also, you often find programming languages that work across multiple operating systems but are limited by the availability of libraries. Consider the C programming language as an example. You would typically find the ncurses library on a Linux or Unix setup, but Windows is not likely to have an up-to-date ncurses implementation so you would have to alter your implementation. Also, you would perhaps use ANSI emulation in Windows but can't expect it to work on Linux or Unix unless you do actually know of an ANSI emulator that is being maintained to work with the current version of the libraries available on the operating system. HTML and a server side scripting language is what you would use if you want to implement phishing attacks. Then again, you would also need to know CSS, Javascript, and Photoshop to make all the pieces fit together. Reverse engineering targets a different kind of security and is typically associated with the serial key generation and acceptance in shareware programs to make them function as fully registered software. Reverse engineering is also used to determine the kind of malware affecting a system. A virus can be examined to determine what exactly it does to the system. If this is not the kind of work that you would be doing as a security expert, you might as well skip this step. I'm barely mid-way down the list, but I've got aching wrists already so I'll just state that although the list is relevant to practitioners of system security, you have to consider the context within which you expect to work to figure out what works best for you.

sheepdog,You ought to take a look at the newer versions of Paint (included with Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8). They are more capable than the ancient Paint in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 - back then, Microsoft Paint could not even open JPEG files so all you could do is open and save BMP files. If you aren't going to go over 256 colors, the GIF file format was pretty cool back in the day because it was not a lossy format like JPEG and you could use the GIF file format for creating multiple frames and build animated sequences. The disadvantage was that the GIF file format was the intellectual property of CompuServe. The BMP file format was lossless and simple enough that ab could write the source code to read a BMP format file.There are lots of free utilities out there today so you will most likely never have to use Microsoft Paint. GIMP is a free utility that isn't a powerful as Photoshop but is a good alternative nevertheless. For vector art, you can choose between Adobe's Illustrator or the free Inkscape. Adobe Fireworks is also great for a combination of vector and raster graphics work. I also find Fireworks easier to work with than Illustrator.

My research is on software adoption within organizations. I intend to look into the organizational factors that affect the decision to use information system. I suppose my research would take at least two more months before I can form a draft that I can hand in to university, though the sooner the better.Today we had yet another sand storm in Dubai. Everything outdoors was looking yellowish, like when applying the Sepia filter on a camera or with Photoshop and you see all photographs the way they had those vintage photographs taken. To me, it looked cloudy except with a different color, and although there was more than a slight breeze, there wasn't any visible sand being blown around. There was what seemed like a cloud burst because there was a sudden incidence of rain that lasted under five minutes and the moisture caused the sand to stick to wet surfaces.

sheepdog,You should consider going vegetarian (that's vegan, plus dairy products). You'll not only lose weight, but you will also stop accumulating negative karma from eating animals as food. Besides, pretty much every fast food outlet has a veggie burger. Sweet Tomatoes has a rather large salad bar and you can get lots of veggies to eat while you're there. Also, you aren't going to encounter food that has a risk of bird flu, mad cow disease, or anything else of the sort when it comes to veggies. Plus, plant diseases do not affect animals (humans included) and vice versa so that's something. I think it has to do with the cellular differences between plants and animals. Raw foods, however, might pose a risk of causing an infection if they have not been cleaned well enough before consumption.Also, you might want to eat more than you usually do earlier in the day. Start off with a large breakfast, get something to eat every two hours as a snack, and have smaller meals toward the end of the day. Avoid eating food that is rich in fats more often than once a week. You will notice that although you are eating more than you normally would, you would have no weight gain and would feel more energetic through the day.If you want to shed weight and keep it off, the only way to do it is to engage in regular exercise at least four times a week that leaves you short of breath after about fifteen or twenty minutes.

Hi!I've been around, logging into the forum every once in a while to update my status. I just got the approval on my research proposal after 6 long months so this week has been a pretty busy week. Also, with the sand storms, I've been having to clean up more often to keep my place tidy so that one other thing I've been occupied with. Oh, and the sand storms are nothing like they portray in Mission Impossible. Tom Cruise must have accidentally stepped onto the set of The Mummy to have the sort of sand storm that he was pictured in.

I've been signing into Xisto recently, but not yesterday so I'm not sure if something specifically went wrong yesterday. I have not been posting much, but I do check the shoutbox every now and then and although there is not a lot going on right now, there is always a slow period before the forum gets buzzing with activity.Over the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at the Laravel framework for PHP, so there just might be something that I can post about to the PHP sub-forum with a thread about using Laravel to put together the MVC structure within an appication. It is quite similar to FuelPHP, a notch above CodeIgniter, and a step down from CakePHP and the Zend Framework.I'm not quite sure of what people really want in software development because earlier we had frameworks that provided the minimum needed to build a web application, then came web application development frameworks that tried to do as much as possible so software developers do not really have to put in much effort into writing applications. Those did seem quite promising but they were difficult to use for people who are trying to develop applications for the first time with the framework, so microframeworks became popular that once again attempt to do as little as possible. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side so there are times when we want something that is feature-rich when all we have is a barren framework that can do very little and there are other times when we have a do-it-all framework for web development and what do programmers demand? They want a barebones framework that does not do much simply because they were using the full-featured framework at the time. In either case, having a lot of different options is the good that comes out of it all.

Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, which is based on Debian Linux, has been in the limelight for quite some time as it took the top spot from Fedora of RedHat. Right now, if you want to pick a Linux distribution, there's a Ubuntu flavor for every need. If you want a modern tablet-friendly interface, there's the mainstream Ubuntu Linux distribution. If you prefer a KDE interface, there's Kubuntu. If you want something light-weight that does not hog memory, there's Lubuntu. Finally, there's Xubuntu which fits between Lubuntu and Ubuntu/Kubuntu in terms of memory usage and provides a rather traditional XFCE user interface when compared to the Gnome 3 and Unity.Linux Mint is a distribution that is based on Ubuntu Linux and presents a traditional user interface for folks who think that the changes that Canonical has been advocating are too radical for their tastes. Then again, one should look at Windows 8 and then give another look at Ubuntu to think about who's making the more radical changes.

Hi!Good to have you with us here on Xisto. Do tell more about TechWealth. It sounds like a knowledge-sharing initiative. BTW, I have never really heard of the title Tech Solutions Agent. What is it that you do? Whatever it is, I'm sure it's fun :-)Hope to see more of you on the forums.

The Laravel framework for PHP has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, and it just might surpass the popularity of Yii and CakePHP by early next year. In the PHP world, there is so much happening that every three years or so, you would find a new major framework that begins to gain massive adoption. In the earlier days, there was CakePHP, then there was CodeIgniter that did gain a greater adoption than CakePHP. CodeIgniter also had a Kohana fork (assuming that it is a fork rather than a clean-room implementation; correct me if I'm wrong). Next, came FuelPHP but it did reach a point when its adoption slowed down and the founding development team moved to the Laravel project. FuelPHP is still in active development and is catching up with version 2.0. However, Laravel is getting more users away from other frameworks and that could just give it the first mover advantage in the area that FuelPHP aims at getting into. I'm still picking up concepts in Laravel so it will be a while before I can post back to the forum about stuff that Laravel introduces, so keep reading to know more.

I don't think women's rights are associated with arranged marriage because they are not forced into the marriages but instead they have the same predicament as the men. The women get to meet various prospective grooms till they finally make their choice and the same applies to men. While traditionally, women were less aggressive, there are increasing cases of domestic violence in which the women attack men, and there's nothing that can be legally done because the legal system does not treat it as a case of violence if it is caused by women. However, if the reverse were the case, the law enforcement officials would be at the scene seeking a bribe. Also, if a woman isn't happy with her husband, she can make false allegations and have her husband and his family locked up behind bars for up to two months, which is the duration of the investigation, and when locked up there aren't any human rights officials around to report what really goes on. Of course, there aren't any penalties for wrongful prosecution yet, and the law enforcement folk get their cut of any settlements paid. On the flip side, many women are targeted because they are the ones decked in gold jewellery and if there's a group of individuals targeted in developing nations, it's the ones with the wealth but without the political and law enforcement connections.

Hi!I don't know if anyone else has been following the story about Apple's lightning to HDMI converter. A firm named Panic decided to take a look at the insides of the lightning-to-HDMI converter that Apple sells for $49. Now, for a $49 adapter, the quality of the display was not so great so when Panic took a further look, they determined that the video they were getting was not true 1080p but rather 1600x900 resolution video that was being scaled up to 1920x1080 to meet the resolution requirement for 1080p. That isn't quite what one would expect from a device that is advertised as 1080p. Most people probably would not notice the difference because when viewing and that is what Apple was counting on because it determined that the video quality was acceptable. However, people who were actually looking for the high quality by shelling out the cash for an Apple device and the official Apple lightning-to-HDMI adapter were disappointed. After all, whether the scaling is done by the adapter or by the television set, the quality is not likely to match true HD video output.The folks at Panic who took apart an Apple lightning to HDMI converter were quite surprised to find an ARM processor and two gigabytes of memory within the adapter. Think of it as a Raspberry-Pi within an adapter. The Raspberry-Pi sells for slightly higher because of the additional ports that it provides, but in essence, the lightning-to-HDMI adapter is pretty close and has a close-enough price tag too. The firmware for the device sits on a flash-able ROM, meaning that if the folks at Apple do figure out an efficient way to get full-HD video from the conversion process, the update can be downloaded and flashed onto the ROM considering that the lack of HD is not an interface limitation. However, if the processor is too slow to support full-HD, there is not much you can do with the existing converters and you would have to settle for what you get.Using Apple devices has never really been pocket-friendly, whether you choose to buy a MacBook or you choose to buy an iPhone. Accessories for iPhone devices carry a premium over accessories made for other devices. A comparable device with less cool-ness will burn a smaller hole in your pocket. The accessories will not cost you as much, granted that they will not be as ubiquitous as accessories for Apple's gadgets. If you do have a carrier contract that provides you with a subsidized iPhone, it does make the iPhone reasonable enough considering if your usage would otherwise have cost you pretty much the same in data package usage.

If you are using WordPress, then the most obvious choice would be the bbPress plugin for WordPress. bbPress is from Automattic, who are the folk that created WordPress. bbPress has pretty much the same structure as WordPress so if you want to create plugins and themes for bbPress, you would be able to take your WordPress development skills to get a head start in developing themes and plugins for bbPress. Also, with the custom post types feature in WordPress, it is rather simple to create your own forum based on WordPress. One of the reasons why people pick phpBB, Invision Power Board, or vBulletin is because they are build from the ground-up to work as forums, when compared to bbPress, and therefore they can be hit by a lot more clients before you start to feel that the load on the processor of the web server is overwhelming. You can use WordPress as a content management system to serve relatively static web pages or to host blogs while providing the forum interface for users to post threads of messages. WordPress does provide caching but, as you mentioned, your WordPress setup would be rather slow because caching generally works only for the users who access the website as anonymous users i.e. if the users are not logged in. If they are logged in, most WordPress caching plugins resort to providing the user with live data fetched from the database and processed using the content management system engine running a full cycle through the plugins for transformation of data and finally applying the theme which may make more calls to the database itself. The heaviest bit of processor-crunching functionality in WordPress lies in the conversion of text emoticons into smileys so that is something I always disable no matter where I set WordPress up - the amount of processing power used for just that little bit of functionality isn't something that I could justify and it was easier to insert my own smileys as images rather than having to use the ones provided by WordPress.I am not familiar with the plugins that you are using, but I would advise you to look at the database tables that are in use by both WordPress and phpBB to determine which tables are being used for authentication. Once you are able to determine which tables are in use, you can export the data, convert the columns and the format of the data, and import the data between your content management system (in your case, WordPress) and the forum software (in your case, phpBB). The plugin that you are using essentially performs the same operation but may be using a hook or an action handler whenever a user registers to use the system. Hopefully, you would be able to hire somebody to get everything working the way that it should - a database administrator would be able to copy across the old login details, or a software developer would be able to create a script for you to run such that the script would compare the login details between WordPress and phpBB to determine if there are any user accounts that exist in one system but not the other and the script would then copy them across to keep the authentication sub-systems of both systems in synchronization for the old data. You may have to disable the plugins to keep things sane because it may cause the plugins to try to create users while the synchronization scripts are processing the old accounts. It would help if you can take the systems offline to the end users so you do not have any new user accounts during this period that would cause the systems to be out of synchronization for the newly created (more specifically, during the synchronization period) users as well.

Spyda,Good to have you back with us here on the forums. I do remember coming across a couple of posts from you back in the day. I am pretty sure the posts must still be around somewhere, buried under the tons of posts that have covered them up with the years of postings under the Xisto moniker. You probably remember the history behind the forum being named Xisto too - there was an Internet cafe in the Indian city of Mumbai where some of the folk from the forum used to frequent. The Xisto web page was with a red background and a black spider web, perhaps even a black spider on it but I'm not really sure. I wonder where they got a screenshot of it, considering it is quite old. I think it may have been from the WayBackMachine website. I did manage to find content from some old blogs on the WayBackMachine and it was kinda fun although it would have been nice to be able to comment on the blog post archives too, considering that any contact information posted on the original web pages and blogs from the archives would be non-existent too. I sometimes think people ought to use GMail, Hotmail, or Yahoo instead of an email address from a domain simply because these three email hosting providers seem to have a greater continuity than the domain names of most websites. I sometimes wonder if these three email service providers will outlive some of the folks who grew up using them considering how email has been around since the nineties and is still here despite short messaging service text messages, multimedia messaging service, instant messaging services, and hybrids like WhatsApp getting all so much attention. Some people I know even use FaceBook or Twitter more often than instant messaging and there are even folk who are still glued to IRC.BTW, what kind of websites do you run? I'm guessing it may have something to do with e-commerce for you to want to get dedicated web servers for hosting your website. Those literally cost you enough to buy your own low-end server at the end of the year when you total the expenses of getting one of them, assuming that you are not counting MyCENT credits, which perhaps is something that keeps trickling into your account so you can get web hosting packages with them. I was considering the unmetered package or a virtual private server hosting a few months ago, but a project that I was counting on did not come through so I had to settle for the Logic Basic hosting plan. Sure, it has its limitations, but when one has been out-of-work for a while with expenses running by every month, it's something that comes as a kind of a blessing. Hey, do you remember Saint Michael from back in the day on Trap 17? He's still on the forums and you would occasionally find some posts from him too, though not as much as we used to on Trap 17. Pretty much everyone from the old forums have been tied down with jobs, families, or some other stuff that they get engaged in so we have a few members who come by for an occasional hello, some others who post to get some more MyCENTS and still others who have an on-and-off relationship with the forum.I have not been on Xisto much. In its earlier days, I had an issue with the registration so it took me a couple of months before I finally signed up and then I managed to get myself engaged with Xisto and Xisto so much that there was barely a moment to glance at Xisto. I still log in every now and then to check out if we have any folk from Xisto on there.I hope to see a lot more of you on the forums.

Hi! When I first read your post, I thought the mention of "Intel Pentium" may have been a mistake and I thought you probably meant that you have an Intel-branded processor in your computer, which would most likely be a Core first generation processor, however I did a bit of searching on the model number that you have specified. It turns out that P5S2D is the model number of the motherboard on which your computer is based and the processors supported by that motherboard are the Intel Pentium D processpr, the Intel Pentium 4 processor, and the Intel Pentium Celeron processor, and so I think I have to re-think through the process of recommending a change having realised what motherboard and processor you really have. It is hard to tell you this, but your computer is getting old. The processor you are running may not be able to keep up with the new websites that are more processor intensive in their rendering and scrolling. Earlier, videos were played using a Windows Media Player or QuickTime plugin and later they moved to Adobe Flash, and now they are switching to HTML5 tags with a decoder included within the browser. Normally, this should make things easier for web browser to render, but web designers and developers are also including tons of Javascript for special effects and cascading style sheets for formatting of content is also getting more complex. If all of this was not enough, Windows 7 is a step up from Windows XP in terms of processing needs for the user interface. What you can do right now is set Windows 7 to use fewer resources by going into the system settings, going to the advanced system settings, and selecting the adjust for performance under the setting for performance, visual effects, processor scheduling, memory usage, and virtual memory. Also, switch to using a web browser that is easier on your computer, such as the Opera Web Browser. There's a light-weight web browser named Midori that I have been trying out recently but it is for Linux am I am not sure if they would have a version that can work on Windows too. You should also have your computer defragmented frequently - I have mine set to run every week and as the computer is always left running (it doubles up as a wireless access point, ever since my wireless router died) the scheduled defragmentation occurs faultlessly. You do not need to be concerned about the amount of space that you have left because thirty six gigabytes of disk space is enough for just about any of the computer's processing needs. In fact, if you look at how much memory your computer has, the disk can swap up to eighteen times that amount to the hard disk drive if it does have a shortage of memory, theoretically speaking. While two gigabytes of memory is not much by today's standards, it should be sufficient as the recommended minimum to run Windows 7 for checking your email and browsing the Internet. After you have done all of the above, I do not really think there is much that you can do with your computer considering the processor as the single thing in your computer that is struggling to keep up. A computer's processor has a set of pins to fit into a motherboard and your motherboard would not be have a socket into which a newer processor can fit so when you change your processor, you need a new motherboard too. Also, the memory modules that are present on your motherboard may be too old to be supported by newer motherboards so those have to be changed too. A processor, the memory modules, and a motherboard are, in essence, most of the computer system, leaving only the power supply unit (it converts alternating current to direct current and regulates voltage) and the case (a case is just a box or an enclosure - some people have used planks of wood or pizza boxes instead of a case, with some make-shift supports to keep the motherboard in place). I'm not even considering the screen, keyboard, and mouse right now since those are interchangeable parts and there is little change that would occur for those components. In other words, you can try to get a little more out of the computer that you have but you should consider getting a new one that can keep up with the demands of today's computing needs. It would also have the benefit of running more efficiently so you would get a similar, if not lower, electricity bill and that makes it environment friendly too. If you were to use a tablet computer or a netbook computer, you would be using less electricity (tablets are usually powered by an ARM processor but some have Intel Atom processors; netbooks are usually powered by Intel Atom processors but may have an ARM processor if it does not run Windows). If you would like to get more serious computing done, there are laptop computers with seventeen inch wide-screen displays and even a numeric keypad if you are into a lot of number crunching and use your computer to do your taxes. Lenovo's Ideapads and Toshibas are pretty good and give you the bang for the buck compared to most other brands. I don't know if you have access to Dell's online ordering service or an outlet store which can get you a great deal on other laptops. There are all-in-one desktop computers that even come equipped with touch screens so they are more fun to use. You can even find some all-in-one computers with a stylus in addition to the touch interface so you can use it for more serious work rather than just a pinch and zoom thing that you would normally do on an iPhone from a couple of years ago. With Windows 8, you can put that touch interface to good use and the tile interface can also be used as an information display so you can leave your computer running all day and have the live tiles feature give you information at a quick glance instead of having to get to the browser and navigate to a website to have it show you information, or even refresh a page. Live tiles in addition to a touch screen are great for having on a wall-mounted PC or a large desktop that you have in an area of the house where you would just lounge about so it can give you updates without having to really do anything. If you would like to know about my computing hardware, I have a laptop that I got last year, and another laptop that is about six years old. The six year old laptop is what I primarily use with the newer laptop relegated to desk duty so I do pretty much all of my stuff on the older computer. The old computer runs Linux Mint 14 whereas the newer computer runs Windows 7 Home Premium. Linux Mint was not really my first choice - I would have preferred Ubuntu Linux (from Canonical) but with the current release of Ubuntu Linux, the 3D graphics effects are a part of the core system without really having a 2D interface and my processor overheats as it is so I decided to leave out the excess overhead from having a 3D desktop so I switched to using Linux Mint when it was time to upgrade as I did not want to have an outdated operating system, despite having a long term release of the previous version of Ubuntu Linux that is supported for well into the future. I would recommend using Linux Mint on your computer when you get another one because you can try lots of open source software that is free to use too. The same open source software isn't well-maintained on the Windows platform so it tends to crash more often but it is probably because the developers who volunteer their time run Linux themselves and therefore the Windows editions of the software have not been tested much on Windows. I do sometimes have the temptation to run Linux on my newer laptop computer too but I resist that urge for those times when I need to run Windows. I retired all of my old hardware to a closet to serve educational needs - I have a laptop powered by an Intel Pentium 4 processor but it has a loose power connector and several keys on the keyboard that do not work. I have an old 386 laptop that runs Windows 3.1 without a working screen but I keep it around for show-and-tell. It is an AST-branded notebook so the folks from Samsung would probably love to have it on a display pedestal as a part of their computing history (I heard Samsung bought out AST). All my desktops have been given away because running them wasn't environment friendly; folks who used those computers only turned them on when needed and turned them off after they were done so they are not hurting the environment in any way while still in existence somewhere.

Hi!I tried accessing the page you have linked to, but with all of that Flash content, my browser simply hangs - on Linux, the Flash browser plugin is a CPU hog and cannot handle websites with a lot of Flash content like it does on Windows. I don't know if it was the embedded slideshare presentations that were a little too much for the Flash plugin but it did hang twice where the browser was almost unresponsive and it crashed once. I did get to play one of the videos though, just before the Flash plugin crashed and took the tab with it, and the video works as intended.I think you may have a browser plugin from DivX that attempts to play the video that you have on the page. Look into the list of the plugins that are installed in your web browser - if you are using Firefox, the Tools menu should have an entry for Add-Ons where you can look up the plugins and extensions that you have within your web browser. Plugins are typically used to provide the ability to play certain content whereas extensions can be used to script some functionality into the browser using the Firefox API and provide additional capabilities to the web browser. Try to disable the plugins and give it another go to check if you are able to get the video to play.

sheepdog,The whole of the middle east is not really in conflict. Remember Dubai? That city from Mission Impossible 3, with the Burj Khalifa (the world's tallest tower), the J.W. Marriott marquis (the world's tallest hotel), and the world's largest cake? I think they also have the world's third largest shopping mall. Yes, that's a pretty good place to be with no conflicts of any kind - political, military, civil or anything of the sort. Did I mention that Dubai has no taxes either? And the weather in Dubai is pretty good too. Saying that the middle east is a war zone is like generalizing everybody from asia to have pale skin and characteristics eyes, whereas Indians are from Asia too and they do not usually have any of those characteristics.When referring to the middle east, there is the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's stuff happening in Egypt, and there was the recent issue involving Bahrain Air, let's not forget Syria which has been in the news recently. There is so much happening in the Middle East, but each of the situations is pretty much localized to their regions of occurrence. Within the Middle East, there are so many different places so you have to treat each of the nations within the Middle East as a separate nation before you can figure out where the situation is going.

Different motherboard manufacturers build their board slightly differently. There are reference implementations for them to treat as guidelines as they build motherboards to match the processors that they are being built for, but beyond that, they get to build the motherboards as they see fit. There is also the BIOS that is developed by a bunch of different manufacturers so you cannot really determine if the behavior of two different systems would be the same. Also, even when two motherboards being compared have a BIOS from the same vendor, the BIOS can still be customized to some extent. For instance, at least some models of Sony Vaio laptops have the same BIOS vendor as some HP and Lenovo models, yet the Sony Vaio models have virtualization disabled - it is just one of the many differences that you can notice between manufacturers cranking out so many different kinds of motherboards.It is quite possible for bad RAM to prevent a computer from starting up. I had a quick go at a desktop computer that I was fixing, and it was the RAM that prevented the computer system from starting up to the extend that the fan wouldn't start, there was absolutely nothing on the screen, and there wasn't even a POST beep. Lacking any sign of activity, I stripped down the computer to its basics and it would only start up after I removed one of the two memory modules that were inserted on that motherboard.Strange stuff happens with hard disk drives too. I have a USB drive that prevented the computer from getting past the BIOS screen and it only began after the hard disk drive had a two or maybe three feet drop from a table.