Migrating to a new system

Hi, hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction; the more I research the more confused I get.

My mom has an old WinXP system with some old programs you cant get anymore. I bought her a new Win7 system. What I want to do is copy her WinXP hard drive and let her have the ability to run the newer computer just like it ran before (but on much faster hardware) and alos run the new Win7 system. I read about virtual machines; this seems like the better solution, but I cant figure out if its possible and how. I'm also trying the dual boot approach; shirnk the new partition on the new PC, make a new drive, then make that drive bootable but I'm not sure if that is giong to work.

So basically.. without removing the physical drive off the old PC and sticking them in the new PC to be able to boot off either physical drive, what is the best way I should go about making it so she has her new PC and the abiiity to have her exact same XP OS as well on the new PC?

Thanks for any help.

 

You should be able to make an image of the xp system on the old drive.

Then restore it to the new drive in the new machine.

You would need something like Paragon p2p adjust so it will boot on the new hardware.

You will also need a windows product key that is valid for a different machine.