I have a PC desktop and I just purchased a Dell Laptop. The technician at my Internet provider helped me transfer my e-mail account so that I would get all future e-mails on my laptop. He couldn’t tell me how to transfer my address book, old e-mails, etc. from my desktop onto my new laptop. I was wondering if you could advise me on how to make that happen? Or maybe you could tell me where to get that info?

Transferring the address book is relatively easy. In fact, while this won’t help you since you’re switching computers too, many e-mail programs will actually import address information from other programs or older versions on their first run. All you really need is some sort of media (floppy or USB drive) to copy the information over. You could probably even e-mail it to yourself if you know how to use attachments.

Outlook Express

In Outlook Express, select File, then Export, and then Address book. I recommend that you use a comma-separated values (CSV) format as it’s more portable and can be recovered if something happens since it’s just a basic text file. Copy that onto the new computer, choose File, then Import, then the CSV file. That should do it!

Backing up e-mail is more difficult, however.

Here’s the basic process in Outlook Express…