This post is for the system admins in the bunch…. Microsoft has a great group of software coders under their wing. In my opinion, Microsoft’s team is their most prominent and valuable group thanks to their excellent support tools and admin software. In this post, I am focusing on a very interesting tool called .
is a tool that converts a PC as-is to Microsoft’s virtual hard disk (VHD) format for use in Virtual PC or Hyper-V. This tool can save a great deal of time if needing to archive a PC as-is, or upgrade a user to Windows 7. Because Windows 7 has native support for VHDs, you can install Virtual PC on the Windows 7 computer and run the computer you converted to VHD as a virtual PC. You can even add a VHD as a boot option to boot the computer directly to the VHD instead of Windows 7 :) A great feature of this tool is that you can virtualize a PC while it is turned on and online.
For more information on and other administrative tools check out Windows Sysinternals on Technet