Store Contacts in Windows Live Mail

I have just built a new PC with Windows 7 on it. My old PC had XP with MS Office 2003 OEM, but I have decided to go with Open Office on my new machine to save expense.

I have some miscellaneous contacts and some calendar reminders stored on my old machine in Outlook, and I need to transfer these to my new machine. I thought I could do this using Windows Live Mail. So I nstalled it on both machines, then transferred my Contacts from outlook to WLM on the XP machine, then exported them to a csv file. So far so good forgetting about reminders for the moment....

But when I try to import the contacts csv into Windows Live Mail on my new Windows 7 machine, I find I can only import mail messages. A lot of the menu icons are greyed out and there is no option to import contacts. Is this because I have not set up WLM as an e-mail client? I have not done this as my e-mail is web based and I dont need a client for it. I just want to store some contacts / reminders on it.

WLM is an email client or program that must be downloaded and installed on a PC. Hotmail is the web based email service that Microsoft provides. If you want to import contacts into Hotmail, check out the Hotmail website for options.

Thanks Roncerr. Last night I had a brief interlude of clear thinking, and decided it was daft to do what I had planned. Instead I uploaded all my contacts from Outlook to my web based email server (Fastmail), and configured WLM as a client for it.

I can now see all my contacts in WLM, with address/phone no etc, but strangely there are no email addresses. Have I missed something?

Also if I could copy my Outlook calendar to WLM that would be a bonus.

I dont have a hotmail account. Do I need to set one up just to get my contacts properly into WLM, or should I be able to do it with Fastmail? (The only account I have)

Thanks Roderunner. I take it from what you are saying that WLM works best with hotmail, and that with Fastmail, I may loose some features?

Just seen a page on their website re setting up Fastmail with Windows Mail on Vista so will check this out to see if it will fix my basic problem of no emaill addresses showing.

Roderunner, after looking around Fastmail website, I saw that Thunderbird was recomended, and there were some explicit setup instructions to get it going. So ditched WLM for same and got my contacts in first time. Thanks for help anyway - now sorted