Windows 8 In Depth

Converting a Physical Computer to a VM

If you’re like me, you probably have one or two old computers that you rarely use anymore, but you keep around because of one application you use once or twice a year, and some files you might want to get to someday. If so, you may be able to vacuum up the contents of its hard disk into a virtual machine, so that you can run the old computer anytime you want, right from within Windows 8. Older computers often have hard disks that are fairly small by today’s standards—under 300GB in most cases, with most of that unused—so copying their contents into a single file on your new hard disk isn’t that unreasonable.

We’ll give you the procedure for Hyper-V. Other products such as VMware have their own tools for ...