Here's a fun topic for a Friday.

I have an OLD Dell Optiplex machine still running Windows XP and Quickbooks 2005! (Pause for everyone to point and laugh.) But...all I use it for is invoicing and why buy a new version of Quickbooks or anything else to do just that? I literally boot it up once a month to do invoicing, but there are a bunch of other programs on there and I'd like to keep it around for fun and posterity anyway. (No I will never surf the Internet with it etc. I'm aware of the security issues. It's a local machine only.)

This thing is WAY beyond it's EOL date obviously and I figure the hard drive will give up it's ghost at some point. What I'd like to do is virtualize it and then be able to spin it up as a VM on my Windows 11 machine. Don't care if it's native Windows virtualization or VirtualBox or whatever.

I found this article and a few others but I figured I'd solicit the Nerdery's advice.

TIA

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2277073-how-to-convert-dead-windows-xp-system-to-hyper-v-guest-on-windows-server-2019

I assume this is an OEM copy of Windows that came pre installed on the machine? If so, you'll have some issues converting it to a VM AND you'll need a license key for the VM once you successfully convert it.

I also assume the host machine will be Windows as well?

It can be done but depending on the amount of specialized drivers and software on the source machine it can get hairy so just be prepared for that.

Virtualbox is an option but you should read their conversion steps to see if you're equipped and up for it as there are command line execution steps involved along with a host of other things.

An easier path would be to use something like VMware converter and VMware player. They're solid and fully supported as well.

You'll still need to manage the OEM hurdles regardless.

Best of luck!

Haven't run them in some time as I switched to Parallels and never looked back, however in the past both VMWare and Virtual PC had pretty simple options to virtualize a real PC. Funny enough my use case is now 100% exclusively QuickBooks as well as everything else has migrated to native macOS or the cloud.

Anyways, seems like disk2vhd might be an option for Virtual PC but I'm pretty sure VMWare did this natively.

I believe Parallels is Mac only if I recall correctly but it's a great option as well if your host is MacOS.

Pretty sure windows XP licenses were universal in that if you can find a single XP key it would work with any pc and any disc. The PCs didn't check in to see if the license was already used like they do now.

I remember this, because I knew people who built pcs and when the cd burners came out, some guy copied xp and wrote the XP key across the disc. I asked them 'wouldn't that only work one time' and they said there was just a single check when it is being installed. If you put the key in there, it would not ask again.

No clue, but that is how I remember it.