Can I easily dump my old Win98SE laptop into Virtual Box running on my WinXPPro SP3 desktop so that the old laptop will "live forever"?
I have never done any virtual computing, although my wife accuses me of virtual dishwashing. If I install Virtual Box on my home Dell Optiplex 755 running WinXPPro SP3, with 4GB of RAM, would it be possible to "dump" my 10-year old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 laptop (Win98SE) into Virtual Box so that the laptop and everything on it live forever and also remain usable (and changeable) inside Virtual Box?
I asked my IT guy whether something like that was possible, he gave me five seconds of silence (meaning stunned by my ignorance and searching for a diplomatic way out) and then said it might be possible if I used a cloning program (Acronis?) to clone the laptop into a virtual ... thingy.
There are no normal Win98SE disks. Toshiba did supply a custom OEM disk for re-installing the Win98SE OS with Toshiba utilities onto the laptop, but I am guessing it is not useful for Virtual Box by itself and, anyway, would have none of the Win98SE updates that came out since the stone age.
FYI, if I do this, I would prefer to park the laptop/Win98SE clone somewhere in my external hard drive, a Western Digital 1 Terabyte "Book" that is connected by USB to the Dell Optiplex 755.
Please start me on this path to knowledge. You may want to give me links to Virtual Box + Win98SE for dummies - that's OK.
Thank you, o wise people!