Friday, October 17, 2008

Virtualising your PC for free

It's a good thing I sleep with my IT support man (have done for the past 20 years), because he finds all sorts of Clever Things that I should do... and then does them for me.

The latest Clever Thing is an article by David Fearon in October's edition of PCPro on how to virtualise your PC free of charge. The article explains how you can convert a Windows XP PC to a virtual PC and run it on a Vista machine. This results in the exact state of the old machine being replicated onto the new machine, where it can be used full screen exactly as if you were using your old machine - a ghost within a ghost, if you like.

To be honest, it's my husband's area of expertise, rather than mine, but the way the article is written, I swear I could do it if I had to. There is a series of twelve screen dump images talking you through the process.

Of course, someone will inevitably ask the question "Why would you want to?" and to that I can only give the answer that applies in my situation. I have just bought a new laptop for Learning Anorak, but I still have a machine on loan from one of my clients. The thing is, I need that machine's state to finish the project I am working on for them. This way, I can virtualise the machine onto my new laptop (oh, alright, my husband can do it), return their machine, but still have it.

A bit "have your cake and eat it, too."

5 comments:

John Zurovchak said...

Karyn,

That is one of the funniest opening blog post lines I have EVER read! I can't say that I will encounter that line too much anywhere else...at least not that anyone would admit to publicly!

Thanks for the Friday morning laugh out loud.

John

The upsycho said...

@John Why thank you, sir! Happy to have brightened up your day.

Anonymous said...

Read your posts thanks for the links of these awesome blogs. I was wondering who this lucky guy was till I read the rest. You sound happy and enjoying your work.

Anonymous said...

Ahhhhhhhh
I must be going crazy
I can not find the link to this information, I have gone to PC Pro site and even searched, still I can not find it.
Please help with a link.

The upsycho said...

@Trevor I apologise for your frustration. The article was in the print version of the magazine: issue 168.

I did try to find it online, so that I could provide a link, but it seems the online and offline versions of the magazine don't carry the same articles :o(

If you are unable to track down a copy of that issue, I am fairly sure that you can contact them and ask them to send it to you. I have done this in the past with Time magazine articles.