HP Pavilion 8570 C question & Asus P2B-VE & virtual machine

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (More info?)

I have a old Pavilion 8570 c which runs special software. I need a
back up of this machine. I thought I could just buy another HP
Pavilion Pentium 3 based machine and ghost the drive and have a back up
plus a faster machine like a 1 Gig P3. The 8570 C uses a 450 Mhz P3
and HP's site says it uses an Asus P2B-VE.

The software I have has special Windows settings and I cannot get the
programmers to go down that road of porting to a newer machine. HP's
site says 6460,8400,8500,7200,7300 series Pavilion's use the same
motherboards. I can find these older machines on eBay but they are
slow.

Any ideas on moving the project to a new machine and having it emulate
my old Pavilion settings with virtual machine software or something.
The machine could use some more speed. I am at 450 MHz P3 with 256 MB
(max) RAM. I can move to a 10,000 RPM IDE drive versus 1995-1997 era
drives. I have a few ghosted as backups.