Anyone with expereince of P2V:
would I be able to create an image of my current install (Windows 7) and add it as a virtual machine to another machine, say when I move to a new one, say with Windows 10?
-tomos
I did just that this past summer, when an intermittent motherboard problem forced me to replace my primary desktop system before I had planned to. Win7 Pro 64-bit to a VMware virtual machine. The whole process was point & click simple and worked the first time without a hitch. I didn't even have to reactivate Windows in the VM, although that could be a fluke. My only complaint is that it didn't have an option for a split file VM, which I prefer for portability.
This is not the first time I have done a P2V with Paragon HDM Pro -- a few years ago, I converted my last working XP system to a VM, which I still use occasionally for some older software, but I was still surprised at how easy the whole process has become in the current version of HDM Pro.
A few years ago, Paragon changed their backup file format to a proprietary compressible virtual machine, which HDM PRo can convert to any of the virtual machine formats they support. That means that, if you regularly back up your system by imaging the system partition with Paragon software and save the backup files, you can, in theory, always resurrect a dead system or a previous version to a working VM in any of those virtualization environments. I haven't tried the other VM formats, but I know from personal experience that this works very well with VMware Workstation.