Toshiba Equium A110-233: keyboard malfunction

The H key stopped working on a Toshiba Equium A110-233 - an obsolete but until now reliable laptop. This was a problem as H was in the power-on password. Notes on the Equium:

• It uses a Fn key to emulate a numeric keypad but it won't emit Alt code based characters.
• It recognises USB keyboards at boot time/in the BIOS.
  • The Advent K112 wired USB keyboard was the cheapest I could find at short notice
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ThinkPad X121e: running 64-bit guest operating systems

Like many programmers, I like to run virtual machines to isolate development and test environments from everything else I do on my laptop. My Lenovo ThinkPad didn't support all the virtualization features I wanted out of the box, but it was relatively trivial to enable them.

Errors from virtualization software manifest as complaints about missing VT-x support or a failure enabling long mode. Virtualization support needs to be enabled in the BIOS. Instructions are provided in the user guide.

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