Question about Virtual Machine systems

[Joseph Sinclair]

All,
  Knowing that some of you are far more experienced with running things in a VM than I am, I would like to know if any of you have ideas for the following scenario:

  I have a family member who is running Windows XP and the box it's on is dying fast.  Rather than buy a new
Windows box and attempt to, maybe, migrate everything, my thought is to take a full disk backup of the Windows
machine and load that into a Virtual Machine on one of my Linux systems.  This, however spawns a few questions:
1) Is it possible to load a live Windows system backup into a fresh VM on a different machine like this and have it actually work?
  a) Is there a specific way I should take the backup to ensure an easier transition?
  b) Which VM software would be the best choice for this?
  c) Does anyone have any other suggestions to help make this as smooth as possible?


Thanks in Advance,
==Joseph++