UTM has a GUI and supports qcow2 natively. Just point to your image, set architecture x86_64, and use the QEMU backend.
For “high quality” disk and network performance, install virtio drivers:
When searching for a Windows XP QCOW2 download, especially one described as "high quality," several factors are crucial: windows xpqcow2 download high quality
Open a terminal (Linux, WSL on Windows, or macOS):
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o preallocation=off,cluster_size=64K winxp.qcow2 20G
If you download a VMWare or VirtualBox XP image (.vmdk or .vdi): UTM has a GUI and supports qcow2 natively
qemu-img convert -f vmdk windows_xp.vmdk -O qcow2 windows_xp.qcow2
Then add compression to reduce size:
qemu-img convert -c -f qcow2 windows_xp.qcow2 -O qcow2 windows_xp_compressed.qcow2
Searching for a "high quality" Windows XP qcow2 file is a request for a pre-installed, virtual hard disk image of Windows XP formatted for QEMU/KVM virtualization. While these files exist, finding a "high quality" version is difficult due to age, driver incompatibility, and security risks. Most users are better off installing from an ISO file rather than downloading a pre-made qcow2 image. For “high quality” disk and network performance, install
Use this for installation (high quality = correct drivers later):
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2048 -cpu host -smp 2 -drive file=winxp.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=ide -cdrom winxp_sp3.iso -boot d -vga std -usb -device usb-tablet -net nic -net user
During installation: Choose NTFS and format normally.