I have been building PC's and transferring information around for a long time but over the past few weeks I have been reading about some free VMWare products and one really awesome product called VMWare Converter. We used this product to convert my wife's old XP machine to a VMWare machine, so she could run it on her Mac with VMWare Fusion.
I also installed and started to use Ubuntu JEOS (Just Enough OS) on a VMWare Server instance. I think I will use these to replace my older Athlon XP Machines (they will die soon I feel.)
So if you want another machine, but don't want to transfer it, I recommend these steps:
- Strip down old machine (i.e. remove media files, and uninstall unneeded software.
- Download and run VMWare converter.
- Copy virtual machine image created by converter to another drive.
- Install VMWare Player on new machine, and then run your old machine. (Warning: Windows might require you to reactivate your machine because the hardware has changed significantly.
- Install UBUNTU on your old machine and turn it into a server or spare browsing machine.