Best way to Virtualize physical PC

[YogiYang]

Hello,

I have a properly configured Laptop which is working properly. HDD is of 500 GB and RAM is 8 GB.

I just purchased a new Laptop with 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD. I want to virtualize the old Laptop as a virtual machine in the new laptop instead of spending day installing all the required software in the new laptop.

Please suggest the best way to achieve this.

TIA

Yogi Yang

[socratis]

How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox, or search for "physical to virtual virtualbox" or "p2v virtualbox".

[mpack]

I want to virtualize the old Laptop as a virtual machine in the new laptop...
Please suggest the best way to achieve this.

Google for the "Disk2VHD" free tool. As the name implies, this will image your old drive to dynamic VHD format. The VHD will be the size of the used portion of the old drive, and therefore hopefully much less than 500GB. It pays to first delete or move all unwanted large files before imaging the drive - the free "WizTree" tool is great for identifying the largest files on your drive.

The only downside is that VHD is not a reliable format. Before use you should convert it to VDI using CloneVDI.

Then you build a new VM around the VDI, i.e. create a new VM. When you get to the disk creation step select "Use existing" then move the VDI into the VM folder then select it in the dialog (i.e. try to end up with all files in one folder).

... instead of spending day installing all the required software in the new laptop.

When I get a new PC I find it useful to virtualize the old PC to use as a reference for my optimal settings etc. However running the applications out of the VM is probably not practical if you are using the host directly as well, so you'll still have to install software. Besides, installing software isn't the big deal it used to be when you had to hunt through a stack of old install CDs. I have a folder on a secondary drive which has the installers for all my current apps. The apps themselves may provide the means to transfer settings/profiles to new machines, and that will work even when one machine is a VM.

[socratis]

the free "WizTree" tool is great for identifying the largest files on your drive.

Nice program, I didn't know it. I personally use "WinDirStat", which besides using the tree map for visualization, it has got to have the coolest progress indicator... . It's quite old, but works great.

[YogiYang]

Thanks everyone for your invaluable suggestions.

I will try them out to solve my problems.

Regards,

Yogi Yang