Exporting E-mail and then Importing E-mail

[JD]

I've been advised by Gateway techs to do a clean reinstall of Windows.
I've saved my documents and exported Address Book and IE Favorites to a CD.
My wife has a lot of sent and saved e-mail that she doesn't want to lose.
What is the best way to save it?
OE's Help talks about exporting to another program, but I would want to
export and then import back to OE. Will that work?
Thanks.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

I've been advised by Gateway techs to do a clean reinstall of

Windows.


Why? Please explain your problem here and ask for help before you
do this.

It's very seldom necessary to do this, but it's advice you often
see from technical support people at many of the larger OEMs.
Their solution to almost any problem they don't quickly know the
answer to is "reformat and reinstall." That's the perfect
solution for them. It gets you off the phone quickly, it almost
always works, and it doesn't require them to do any real
troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't
possess in any great degree).

But it leaves you with all the work and all the problems. You
have to restore all your data backups, you have to reinstall all
your programs, you have to reinstall all the Windows and
application updates, you have to locate and install all the
needed drivers for your system, you have to recustomize Windows
and all your apps to work the way you're comfortable with.
Besides all those things being time-consuming and troublesome,
you may have trouble with some of them: can you find all your
application CDs? Can you find all the needed installation codes?
Do you have data backups to restore? Do you even remember all the
customizations and tweaks you may have installed to make
everything work the way you like?

Occasionally there are problems that are so difficult to solve
that Windows should be reinstalled cleanly. But they are few and
far between; reinstallation should not a substitute for
troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, to be done only
after all other attempts at troubleshooting by a qualified person
have failed.

 

[JD]

I am loathe to undertake such a herculean task. It is daunting, to say the
least.
Everything works fine on this system except for one minor annoyance: when I
use the up button on the scrollbar, then stop, even after only half a page,
the on-screen text is distorted. It usually looks as if lines had been typed
twice. It clears up by adjusting the window size. Until the next time.
This does not happen with Word Pad or Works documents.
They have had me uninstall and reinstall Word--and then the entire Works
Suite.
I have adjusted the hardware acceleration rate, tried different screen
resulutions, updated video drivers, adjusted the monitor refresh rate, and
more than I can remember at this moment.
I tried a conventional roller-ball mouse (replacing the optical mouse).
All to no avail.
The super-tech who is on my case now is convinced that it is "a software
problem" and tells me that I have no choice but to reinstall the entire
system.
I could, of course, just live with the situation. It really is minor. But it
bothers me that ANYTHING on a brand new computer doesn't work perfectly.

 

[Plato]

I've been advised by Gateway techs to do a clean reinstall of Windows.

The big international brands allow maybe 15 minutes per call to
troubleshoot a problem. After that, they say do a restore/clean install.

In other words, they do not spend the time/money to actually
troubleshoot specific niggles.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I've been advised by Gateway techs to do a clean reinstall of Windows.
I've saved my documents and exported Address Book and IE Favorites to a CD.
My wife has a lot of sent and saved e-mail that she doesn't want to lose.
What is the best way to save it?
OE's Help talks about exporting to another program, but I would want to
export and then import back to OE. Will that work?

Use the OE backup tool at
http://www.oehelp.com/OEBackup/Default.aspx

Also read Gary Woodruff's article on Files and settings Transfer at
http://aumha.org/win5/a/fast.htm which will help with other things

 

[JD]

Thanks Alex. I've read both of these articles profitably.