Wht is the current wisdom regarding WinXP -- do a clean install or try to use transporter -- I assume that cleaning up your Win machine is a good idea -- uninstall prorams you dont use defrag etc? but in the end is it better to do a clean install?
Personally, I always prefer a clean installation, but I don't see any reason not to try Transporter first. And yes, I'd certainly clean up Windows before performing the import.
Hello! Clean installation is better always. You may transport your phisical hard drive and connect it to your VM to take and use files drom it.
I would say it is better. The likelyhood of something having gone wrong is lower when you do a clean install.
After thinking more about it I see that I overlooked one very real concern. If Transporting XP from a physical machine which has a multi-core or hyperthreaded CPU (most Pentium 4s are hyperthreaded), the transported image will have the symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) hardware abstraction later (HAL) installed. Parallels VMs expose the CPU as a single-core unit. While Windows with an SMP HAL will certainly run on a single-core CPU, there's a lot of thread-scheduling inefficiency since the kernel expects to be able to execute multiple threads in hardware simultaneously. This has been a well-known issue with cloned Windows machines (physical and virtual) for some time. This problem has been reported on VMWare's forums. Since it's not polite to post a link to a competitor's discussion threads, you can find the details for yourself by Googling 'smp hal'.
