I had been meaning to upgrade/replace the main computer in our study for some time, basically ever since it started sounding like a 747 taking of 24/7 and had gradually accumulated enough junk to run slower than a dogma film. It was about 7 years old, so this was more than excuse enough to switch from the Packard Bell PC to a nice big new shiny iMac. Once it arrived, I copied across all the key data from the old machine, but on past experience I knew at some point there would be an application or settings file or an obscurely located document I would desparately need but had failed to copy across. Enter VMWare's converter tool! I'd been using VMWare fusion for a while on the MacBook to be able to run Windows without having to reboot as well as to play around with other operating systems (yes, I know we're moving to the cloud, but I still enjoy experimenting with different operating systems) but I'd only recently learned about the converter. Basically the converter clones your old physical machine as a virtual machine.

It's extremely easy to use, particularly with the help of this video guide: install converter on the old machine, connect an external drive, fire up the converter, step through a few options pages and away you go. The result is that I am now able to run an identical copy of the old computer on the iMac: all the applications, settings, desktop, files, etc! I suspect I may even be running etax 2010 on this virtual machine as all the old etax data is still sitting there.