How important is TXT and VT-d?

[Giles Orr]

My desktop is getting a little long in the tooth and I'm thinking
about eventually replacing it with a laptop.  I'd like the laptop to
be an i7 quad core - which probably means either poor battery life or
a very heavy battery, but that's okay as it would mostly be a desktop
replacement rather than something to carry around.  Right at the
moment the majority of readily available laptops that have a quad core
Intel have the Core i7 2670QM processor, which according to Wikipedia
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors
) doesn't support TXT or Intel VT-d.  Given that the first thing I'd
do is install Linux on the thing, the loss of TXT doesn't sound too
onerous (correct me if I'm wrong, that's why I'm sending this email).
The other part, VT-d ... as I read it, that means I'd have VT-x, but
virtual machines wouldn't have direct access to hardware.  Am I
reading this correctly?  And, given that I've never used processor
level virtualization before and, honestly, I might never (but would
like to have the option), should I really care about this?

There are a couple other quad core i7s commonly available on the
consumer market, but they're also lacking TXT and VT-d so this
question doesn't seem likely to go away.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists