I'm dealing with a situation, and I'd like to tap into the experience of some of our List members, who likely know more about this. Ever since a good computer consultant that we used had to retire due to serious health issues, I've been providing a sort of by-default IT support to a couple places. The office one I could handle because it's all Windows, and involves only a medium-level tech complexity. Another circumstance considerably exceeds that, and looks like it may veer off into Apple territory.
This initially concerns an older desktop system running XP, which has started to run into some troubling failures. (It was taken offline a few years ago, so as not to have to worry about infections from the Internet.) For one thing, the USB ports stopped working -- so, the only way to get stuff in or out is by burning CDs or DVDs. I wanted to determine whether it was the ports themselves that were failing, and by booting with a Win PE disk I saw that they still worked, while in that environment. Deductively then, it is the installed XP that is at fault. Unfortunately, this XP happens to have a few critical legacy Win apps that -- very much unlike our DOS XyWrite ! -- cannot be reinstalled, for various reasons. This leads me to imagine some VM type of solution, off on the horizon.
The user of this XP rig is elderly, not particularly computer savvy, who is generally uncomfortable re having to master new tech things. A couple years ago, she did start using an Apple laptop (that also had a Windows capability), mainly to plug that email and internet deficit, from when the XP desktop machine was disconnected from the outside world. At this point she has some basic familiarity with Apple, and knows about Parallels. But the laptop won't be powerful enough or well-equipped enough to run a couple of those key legacy apps, which call out for a desktop system, one with more memory, cpu horsepower, and particularly storage.
I guess my first question for you is this: Can an Acronis image -- made at a time when the XP desktop was still working properly -- be rendered into Parallels on a new Apple desktop system, and have this all work ? There was a recent trip to an Apple Store, which I was not present for, and a negative answer was relayed back to me. Instead, they mentioned some convoluted procedure involving "the Cloud", which might or might not work. Since I was not a participant for this, and did not have the benefit of a technical back and forth with the Apple reps, I can't have a lot of faith in this. Although I lack any experience with Apple, I probably would have had a better grasp of the concepts being discussed.
I *could* restore the good-though-now-somewhat-dated Acronis image to a bare hard drive, as an intermediary step. (Subsequent program data could be added back later.) That gets matters away from a proprietary, compressed file format of an imaging program. But what then ? (There is obviously no point _now_ in imaging a defective XP.) Are there some other viable scenarios I should be considering ? Win 7 or later + a VM is a much less appealing solution -- to her -- than going forward with Apple and a new desktop system.
Jordan