Farewell Vista, Hello XP

While vCards seemed like a good idea at first, Outlook Express's vCard import function lets you add only one at a time, and if you drag and drop multiple vCards into the program window, you still have to click the Okay button for every card. With about 1000 e-mail addresses to copy, I soured on that path to carpal tunnel in short order.

CSV import was much faster, and with the exception of a couple of odd characters in the First Name field, the Mail and Outlook Express fields matched up perfectly, so I was able to restock the Windows Address Book in XP in about 30 seconds.

Finding an easy way to move my e-mail back into XP proved more difficult. Outlook Express's import function won't import Vista Mail's .eml messages wholesale.   The following   method is simple and   suffices--if you have a taste for the tedious.

You can save Vista Mail's messages to a safe place and then drag them directly into the Outlook Express window.   But if you have a lot of sorted e-mail, you must manually recreate your folder structure--which is where the tedium commences. Here's the step-by-step:

  In Vista, save your e-mail repository to a safe place on another partition or drive before you install or overwrite Vista with XP. Find   the repository   in: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsMail\ Local Folders (Username is your user name). You can redirect the repository to another location by using the Tools, Options, Advanced, Maintenance, Store Folder function, or you can export in Mail format to another location. I recommend the latter (or both).

  After you've installed XP, open Outlook Express, open an Explorer window pointed to the safe location you copied the .eml files to, select them, then drag and drop them to the folder in OE where you want them. As I mentioned, you must recreate the folders yourself.

The above method works, but I have over 250 folders into which I sort e-mail or have archived for particular projects, so I really, really wanted a better way. Since I had Office 2007 with Outlook (any recent version of Office Outlook will do), I   hit on the idea of importing the messages into Outlook from Mail under Vista, then transferring them back from Outlook to Outlook Express in XP. It's a slightly convoluted process, but it requires no tedious labor and works like a charm. The procedure goes thusly:

  In Vista, use Outlook's Data Management dialog box to create a new.pst data file, make it your default, and   then import the messages (not addresses) from Mail. Make sure you save the resulting .pst file to a separate partition that won't be overwritten when you reinstall XP.

  In XP, install Outlook and use it to open the .pst file you created in Vista and make it the default.

  Fire up Outlook Express, choose Import, and select the Outlook option; you should now be good to go.

If you're wondering why I don't use Office Outlook for my e-mail, I have   two reasons: First, Outlook Express is simple, it's extremely efficient, and I'm used to it. The other reason is that the Office version of Outlook   allows only one set of contacts, which I use for the much smaller group of family, friends, and colleagues that I sync to my smart phone. And yes, I tried installing Outlook Express on Vista, but all the OE self-installers I possessed bailed after notifying me that a newer version (Windows Mail) was already installed.

Time for Your XP Install

After all of that prep, installing XP over Vista is, in itself, not too difficult: Boot with your XP installation disc and install XP, overwriting Vista. And just make sure to select the partition that Vista is on and follow the prompts.

As I've said, there's not a lot you can do about migrating your applications back. If you were using two separate PCs, you could use Windows Easy Transfer or a similarly capable commercial product. I didn't consider that option, because   I wanted a lean, clean OS with an uncluttered Registry.

The solution is to reinstall your apps--which   is a pain, but it's the best   way to go.

Am I happy I moved back to XP? Very much so. The time I save by using Outlook Express   instead of Vista's   Windows Mail is worth   the switch   by itself. Personally, I think Microsoft spent too much time, when it was developing Vista, in   fixing stuff that wasn't broken and breaking stuff that worked. I'll take another look at Vistaafter SP1 ships, but I don't think I'll be switching again for a while.

If you'd like to try Vista before removing XP, or if you're using Vista and would like to take a stroll down memory lane to see just how efficient the older OS is, downloadVMware ServerorVirtual PC 2007for free and try them in a virtual machine.