David Fearon explains how to save energy and hassle by converting your old Windows XP PC to a virtual one that you can run on your Vista machine
We’re going to use the wonders of virtualisation to solve an age-old dilemma: how to deal with the transition from an old PC to a new one.
There are two philosophical viewpoints here. You can either just start from scratch, ignoring the old machine and basking in the glow of a new, clean installation of Windows that doesn’t have all the accumulated paraphernalia of your old one slowing it down.
Or you go for a sort of messy replication process, using the likes of Vista’s Easy Transfer Wizard to port your OS setup, and a third-party application (Laplink’s PCmover) to transfer your applications across. The former of those has its drawbacks – you go to use a tool or shortcut you’ve become familiar with and it’s not there; or you suddenly want to use an application you’ve not re-installed on the new PC. The second has the obvious drawback that your lovely new PC will soon be bursting at the seams with old stuff you probably don’t need.
There is a third way, however: virtualise the old PC, turning a physical computer into a software one. With a virtual copy of your old PC installed on a new one, the exact state of the machine is replicated and you can use it full-screen as though you were sitting in front of the old PC. But all of the accumulated software junk is kept encapsulated in the virtual machine image.
When you want to switch back to your super-fast new PC, just shut down the virtual one. You don’t even need to fully shut it down – you can pause the virtual machine, saving its complete state to disk, allowing you to bring it back to life again from exactly where you left off in a few seconds.
How to do it
First, you need to pour your original PC’s software state into a virtual machine. Second, transfer that state to the new PC, and third, install and configure the virtual machine environment to run it in.
Virtualising the old PC is done with the VMware Converter tool, which you can download from www.vmware.com/products/converter. It's free, but you’ll need to enter your details and some information about your intended use. Converter sucks the complete contents of your main system partition off your hard disk, down to the cluster level.
You won’t need to worry about reinstalling anything at the other end. You’ll end up with a single virtual machine disk file. The secondary beauty of this is that you can then just make two copies of that file and archive one off wherever you like, keeping it preserved forever if you want.
VMware Converter will let you copy the image to an external hard disk or over the network. Running the converter is simplicity itself: just install and start it up on the PC you want to virtualise, run through the wizards and change a few of the default options. See the walkthrough above for the complete process.
Once the machine has been made virtual, use VMware’s free virtual machine software to run it on your new PC. The free VM utility is called VMware Server, but don’t let the name put you off. It’ll cope with a standard non-server Windows XP installation without a murmur.
Hiccups
All virtual machine systems run by executing the software from the old physical machine on an extra software layer of their own, abstracting the physical hardware from the operating system.
The OS itself runs on a complete software emulation of a real PC’s hardware – you’ll see this when you boot up the virtual machine in a window and get greeted by a BIOS screen before Windows loads. This has a few consequences. When you first boot your virtualised PC, Windows will start up and find itself apparently running on new hardware. That means you’ll get the standard Windows messages and pop-up dialogs, informing you that Windows has found new hardware and is trying to find drivers.
Because the VMware-emulated hardware is designed to be generic, Windows should soon sort itself out and install generic drivers. The only potential problem is that it’s possible that the Windows Activation process may kick in if your installation deems itself to be running on significantly different hardware. If you’ve used the default setup that shouldn’t be a problem – networking is likely to be functional and you can re-activate over the internet. Failing that, you may have to call the re-activation phone number for an activation code.
In addition, you’ll find the graphics drivers will result in slow screen updates and a sluggish mouse. To cure that you need to install the VMware Tools from within the virtual machine itself. Again, see the walkthrough we’ve provided.