HP ProBook 4730s - enabling vt-x

I'm working on a new DevOps system that relies upon Chef, Vagrant and VirtualBox.  To duplicate the system I needed to run Ubuntu Trusty 64 bit edition in the virtual box.  Vagrant setup failed with timeouts.  When I ran the 64 bit VM Vagrant made through the VirtualBox client it said I did not have VT-x visualization on my machine.

I have a HP ProBook 4730s.

As you can see it uses i5-2430M CPUs.  Checking at http://ark.intel.com/products/53450/Intel-Core-i5-2430M-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-3_00-GHz , shows that :

So, why won't VirtualBox work?  The answer lays in the HP bios.  To enable:

Restart notebook.
Press F10
Choose system features
Device features
Virtualisation
check.
Save
Reboot.

VirtualBox still refuses to run ubuntu 64.  Some googling reveals you have to enable the bios to change the setting, rather than just view.  WTF?

Restart notebook
Press F10
Choose security
Some stupid setting
save
reboot

Now it works.

Connecting to vagrant using NppFTP and Notepad++

Notepad++ comes with a great plugin to enable editing remote files or files on virtual boxes.  It can be a bit of a mystery to setup.  I'll explain what I do to allow editing on a Vagrant box on your Windows PC.

1. start vagrant using vagrant up
2. start notepad++
3. open the NppFTP plugin from the plugins menu.
4. click on the setup gear and choose 'profile settings'
5. click on the add new profile button
6. give it a good name and click OK
7. click on the connection tag
8. enter the ssh port number your vagrant box is using, it'll be 2222 or a variant of that.
9. enter these parameters:  
10.    hostname: 127.0.0.1
11.    connection type: SFTP
12.    username: vagrant
13.    uncheck 'ask for password'
14. click on the Authentication tab
15. check 'Try private key file authentication'
16. click the '...' next to the 'Private key file' edit box.
17. navigate in the file dialog to your Vagrant box location
18. select this file: '.vagrant\machines\default\virtualbox\private_key'
19. uncheck 'ask every time'
20. click close

That should setup the connection.  Try it out by using the  icon.  Click on the  icon to see the log of NppFTP connection attempts.