Hi a friend has a celeron 333 machine running win nt. On this machine is running some hotel management software. The hotel paid £20,000 for the license for this software but the company took the disks away after installation. The company said that if he wanted it installing on a new machine it would cost £1500( and they insist on doing it themselves). The old celeron 333 machine needs replacing. I was wondering if I took an image of the old drive in the celeron 333 and put that on the new machine then reinstalled the win nt over the top that this may work( the new machine will be an athlon 2000 with 512 meg ram). Can antone offer any advise

What is the special software? I would suggest checking any contract you have with the company to see if they should have left you a copy. This company sounds very dodgy An image might work if you can get a similar machine (in terms of hardware) If you need a copy of NT I'm sure ebay would be of great assistance to you.

One thing you need to be aware of is entries in the registry. If you clone the drive, fine you'll have all the files but if the program has a load of info in the registry you will need to 'install' the software to recreate these entries. You could try exporting these entries, there are a couple of places to look:- HKCU\Software\ HKLM\Software\ Check in both of these locations for an entry that matches the name of the package. You can then export these keys to say a floppy and merge them back on a different PC. BUT, some packages will also add CLSID entries (Class IDs) and tracking those down is much fiddlier. You could try a search through the registry though. For example, if the package was called Acme Hotel you could search for "Acme Hotel" and export every entry found but that is still no guarantee that you'll catch every entry.