'We were making more of our customers aware of the idea,' group product manager Jason Joel said in a telephone interview on Friday. VMware says its free converter product, shown above, when used along with the free VMware Player software can help ease the Windows XP-to-Windows 7 transition. VMware's products have been available for some time, but the company this week posted a blog outlining how the two can be used in combination specifically to ease the move to Windows 7. VMware's approach uses Converter to package up and transfer a physical XP desktop into a virtual machine and then allows that XP desktop to run virtually inside the new Windows 7 machine. While its approach is less comprehensive than Parallels $50 product, VMware's approach is free, using a combination of VMware Converter and VMware Player, both of which are available from the company's Web site. VMware says that, like its rival Parallels, it has virtualization software that can help ease the transition from Windows XP to Windows 7.