I've dusted off an old HP Pavilion Elite HPE to stage and test a virtual machine. I'm running Slackware64 14.2 and VirtualBox. This computer has an Intel i7 920 2.67GHz processor. The specs. indicate this processor supports VT-x virtualization. However, the BIOS in this computer does not have a setting to enable that. Questions:

Does anyone know if there is there a BIOS upgrade available with at VT-x setting?

Even if an upgrade is available from HP, they generally come in the form of .exe files run from Windows. I'm running Linux. That may be a problem.

Is there possibly something/somewhere I can "poke" into memory or a system register while booted Linux that would enable VT-x?

Info:

BIOS Revision 5.28 4/9/10
Core Version 08.00.15
Model Number HPE-180t
Product AZ222AV-ABA

It might be enabled by default. Look at the output of the following command.

grep --color vmx /proc/cpuinfo

If you see output with vmx that means VT-x support is enabled in the BIOS/UEFI.