Crausch

Darwin,
I'm not sure where you are at, but this is an explanation I made for a
friend with a new computer from my notes when I did the migration, and they
worked for him.
Like I said, I'm not a Techie, so I might not explain everything quite right.

Migrating Outlook Files to a new computer:

To get to your Outlook files in Explorer you have to find the box to
‘include hidden files’ (in XP I think it was ‘show’). I believe it is in the
regular View menu in Explorer in XP.
To view hidden folders in Explorer on your Vista computer
Tools/folder options/View/display hidden files

If you search for your Outlook files, search for *.pst and you will not
find them unless you include hidden files. Everything (mail, contacts,
calendar) was in one .pst file on both computers. If you use shared Outlook
files, I think you also need to find *.pab files, and I’m not sure what you
do with them.
If I remember right, the .pst files are in the Outlook Program folder in
both XP and Vista, however, the folder path to them is different. Unless
you’ve created your own file, I’m pretty sure it is called outlook.pst in
both XP and Vista.
You need to get your *.pst folder from your old computer into your
Personel Folder on the new computer , and the default for Personal Folders
is Outlook.pst on your new Vista computer.
The path in Vista where it stores the outlook file is:
Your computer name\Users\your user name\my outlook\outlook.pst
If you can avoid it, do not set up e-mail on your new computer until you
have done this, because you will lose all of that when you replace it with
the folder from your old computer. You want the outlook file to stay empty,
and if you set it up, it will start receiving e-mails. Since I set up and
received e-mails on my new computer right away, I created newoutlook.pst on
my Vista computer and moved my outlook files from my old computer into it.
I remember that I had to tell Outlook to open this file as my personal
folders, and I don’t remember how I did that. It may have just come up the
first time I opened Outlook after I created the new file, and Outlook was
confused because it only expected to find one *.pst file. So it asked me the
name of my Personal Folder file.
I did have a problem in that my new Personal Folder showed up all the way at
the bottom of the list of folders in Outlook, and actually went to a second
page. So I did a lot of farting around because I didn’t think it was
excepting my new file, when all that happened was I couldn’t see it!
Later I was able to drop and drag the mail that had arrived in the Vista
Personal Folders into my personal folder just in Outlook. However, if you
have calendar or contacts to merge, I’m not sure how that would work.
There was a lot of discussion on the forum, and discrepancies in articles on
how to physically move the *.pst files. I believe neither backup/restore nor
import/export will take all of the hidden files you need with them. I know I
just dropped and dragged the outlook.pst file to a flash drive in Explorer on
my old computer, and then I think I did a SAVE AS on the new computer.
Your computer name\Users\your user name\my outlook\outlook.pst
Replace outlook.pst with the name that you saved the file as on your Vista
computer. Russ Valentine does address this in his posts to me using the
Outlook installation using the command.
File > Open > Outlook data file

I used the three web sites that Russ recommended to come up with this
procedure.

I hope it helps, and I'm not giving you any bad advice. I have not had any
problems with Outlook on my Vista computer.
Good luck!

"Darwin Akins" wrote: