I mentioned a few days ago how I P2V’d my laptop to try and use a Virtual CD drive to run some software. I couldn’t keep that VM because it needed Windows re-activation (the joys of Microsoft).

However, I had a really, really old laptop with a 650Mhz Pentium III, 192M of RAM and a 12G hard drive which makes a perfect candidate. I had installed XP on it years ago and it ran (very slowly). Having installed VMware converter on it (which took a couple of hours), the conversion ran without a hitch. Impressive! And the VM version, which I boosted the memory on to 1G (and it now has an i5 processor) flies along.

Of course, there is still the question of re-activating the copy of Windows but it is good to know that old home PCs can be virtualised so easily.