First in the words of Mr garrison from South Park: “Jesus tap dancing Christ!”
What a pain in the ass to try and get your contacts from Outlook into Windows Mail, which now comes with Vista…no more Outlook Express.
Luckily when my machine crashed a few weeks ago, I was able to get all the files I needed of of the old hard drives…so I had my pst file from Outlook. No problem, I’ll just import into my laptop which was running XP Pro…then BAM, I got a friggin virus…not a real bad one…actually Norton had caught some adware and removed them and I had to reboot to complete the process…
After I rebooted, I couldn’t get back online…so after I paid Geek Squad $70 to tell me that I needed to do a recovery, I brought the laptop home and popped in the recovery discs that came with my new XP Pro running laptop…but wait, why do the discs say Vista recovery discs…must be a misprint…WRONG!!!
Now the laptop that I bought because it had XP Pro was now a Vista laptop…I’ve heard so much crap about Vista that I started to fume and yell at my cats…they looked at me like, “WTF’s your problem”…anyway…Vista really isn’t that bad, I think people hate it so much because Microsoft in their ongoing love affair with money and the constant need to screw people completely changed windows…things were moved, renamed and deleted…like when you want to open the Run dialogue box from the start menu, it’s gone…but you can right click on the start button and change back to the “Classic” version or you can just hit the windows button and R at the same top and it will open up.
Backing up a bit…after I dropped my laptop off, my phone fell out of my pocket as I was getting in my car and went right between the door and the car…I cracked the screen, so I couldn’t see anything. I figured, i’d get my new phone and just sync it with Windows mail…can’t do it. I installed a trial version of Outlook hoping that would work so I could then get the addresses back on my phone…no dice, and with the trial version of Outlook you can’t import of export files…fucking greedy pricks at Microsoft just want your money!
There’s more than one way to skin a cat…I had the pst file from my old computer, so after I installed the trial version, I went to the directory where the pst file was stored which would look something like this:
C:\Users\Whatever your user name is\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst
I just cut and pasted the pst file into that folder and replaced the old file and bingo…I had all my contacts and folders. I then plugged in my new phone was able to retrieve all my addresses…by the way, Vista uses Windows Mobile Device not Active Sync…it’s the Vista version of Active Sync.
I then installed Mozilla Thunderbird on my machine and imported the Outlook contacts into there, then deleted the trial version of Outlook…I don’t know why it says it was deleted though, because the crap is still on my machine…that’ll be my next task.
Oh, I had to download a trial version of Office 2007 because I got tired of looking for an separate download…it’ll ask you if you just want to install or do a custom install…choose custom, then click each of the programs it wants to put on your machine and choose “Not Available”, unless you want them installed, leave Outlook alone…after, just do what I’ve done and it should work.
Good Luck and if you have questions, leave a comment and I’ll try to help.
Tags: Importing Outlook PST, importing outlook pst into Thunderbird, Windows Vista