I recently bought an Alienware Aurora system that came with windows 7 ultimate 64-bit and an i7 980x Extreme. For the past few weeks, I had successfully installed mac os snow leopard under windows 7 with vmware workstation, had no problem surfing the net with safari or programming iphone apps with xcode. Then all these good things came to an abrupt end yesterday, when I was suddenly greeted with this message when trying to run the Mac OS virtual machine:
"A virtual cpu has entered the shutdown state. This would have caused a physical machine to restart......."
At first I thought some of the windows updates mightve broken vmware workstation, but after 2 clean installs of win 7 and still getting the same error msg, this became less of a possibility. Then on a whim, I took out the 980x cpu, and put in an i7 960 on loan from a friend. Lo behold, VMWare worked again, no more errors.
So I think there is a high probability that there is some hard-ware related defect with my 980x, though Im not ruling out the possibility that some features on the cpu might have been turned off by accident and can be turned on with the right software. Furthermore, with the exception mentioned above, my 980x hasnt shown the slightest problem with any other software. Therefore, I dont think Alienware/Dell tech support would readily agree to an exchange of cpu just because mine has trouble with one specific program, I might have to demonstrate with incontrovertible evidence that my cpu is defective. To that end, I wonder if theres any CPU verification program that checks if all the features on a cpu, say hardware virtualization, are working properly. To check a cpus arithmetic is quite simple, ie running prime95 for a few hours, but I dont have the faintest idea as to validate hardware virtualization.
TIA for any help.
"A virtual cpu has entered the shutdown state. This would have caused a physical machine to restart......."
At first I thought some of the windows updates mightve broken vmware workstation, but after 2 clean installs of win 7 and still getting the same error msg, this became less of a possibility. Then on a whim, I took out the 980x cpu, and put in an i7 960 on loan from a friend. Lo behold, VMWare worked again, no more errors.
So I think there is a high probability that there is some hard-ware related defect with my 980x, though Im not ruling out the possibility that some features on the cpu might have been turned off by accident and can be turned on with the right software. Furthermore, with the exception mentioned above, my 980x hasnt shown the slightest problem with any other software. Therefore, I dont think Alienware/Dell tech support would readily agree to an exchange of cpu just because mine has trouble with one specific program, I might have to demonstrate with incontrovertible evidence that my cpu is defective. To that end, I wonder if theres any CPU verification program that checks if all the features on a cpu, say hardware virtualization, are working properly. To check a cpus arithmetic is quite simple, ie running prime95 for a few hours, but I dont have the faintest idea as to validate hardware virtualization.
TIA for any help.
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