[dba-Tech] New virtual drive

Last night I installed a new ASUS M4A78 Plus mother (2600 MHz), in my wife's
old computer. The motherboard was $100, $30 x 2GB for memory and CPU.
Quad-core AMD... the whole arrangement came to about $230 with taxes... the
only additional expense was having to get an optical DVD drive, $40. 

The new board comes with a 1 GB NIC, two video card slots, eSATA/SATA
connection, 5 on the board and two off the back (all BIOS configurable), in
addition it come with 12 USB ports (auto-sensing; from legacy to high speed
2.0), sound and for backward compatibility it comes with COM and LPT port
connectors as well as IDE slots. The board also supports Firewire but I have
not figured out how to configure it as of yet.

She seems happy but for how long?

Now the question. I hope to just install a virtual PC (VirtualBox?) and
simple install the old XP boot drive in/on the virtual. The old drive was
60GB and the new one is 500GB. I remember there was some talk, on the Lists
about just backing up a drive on to a VPC but I have had no first hand
experience.

Any suggestions? Best methods? Best software? Gotcas? Etc..

MTIA
Jim