I finally got a new computer at work. Actually, that was last Tuesday… It’s a nice machine, 2Gb RAM, Dual-core Intel, only 150GB hard disk (of which 15GB are reserved for the mysterious “recovery” partitions).

Before the machine arrived, I’d been thinking about how to transfer my old machine to the new one. A Virtual Machine would be great - transfer everything to the new screaming piece of metal, and ditch the old one. Especially since I came across VMWare’s Converter, this seemed like the way to go.

Unfortunately, nothing turned out to be easy. Several attempts of running Converter in different ways, from the target Vista machine, or from the old XP machine, always there was some kind of error. After struggling about 2 or 3 days, I decided it may be easier to make a backup of the old machine, create a minimal WinXP virtual machine from scratch, and restore everything to it. This seemed to work, with the exception that after rebooting an odd error about a PROCESSOR1 popped up. Tried the restore several times, with different WinXP installations, no go.

Finally gave up. And since I didn’t want to go through installing Windows again, I decided to set up the machine with Vista 64-bit. Our SysAdmin warned me about possible problems, but after struggling with transferring data for 5 days, I didn’t want to reinstall Windows any time soon.

So, as of last Saturday, I’m running Vista 64-bit. All seems well - so far only one program has been acting up (Above&Beyond 2006). I’ve got a little bit of a problem with printer drivers, but that is because SysAdmin didn’t install Vista-64 drivers on the servers.

I’m still setting up stuff, but for now all seems to be working. I’ll keep you posted!

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