Help! My computer died abruptly, and now I'm trying to transition to a new computer. Either the power supply or the motherboard died on the old computer, but I was able to pull out the old hard drives and access the data on them using an external hard drive enclosure (yay!). But now I'm struggling to incorporate all the old data onto the new computer. My current puzzle is Thunderbird.

Old Computer was Windows XP, old version of Thunderbird was (I think) 3, and the computer had 2 hard drives - the smaller C drive for programs, and the larger D drive for data. I was saving my email to a directory on the D drive, although I think the Thunderbird profile was on the C drive. I have multiple email addresses and Thunderbird was downloading and saving email for all of them.

New Computer is Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit, Thunderbird 11.01. I can't figure out how to import my old email into the new Thunderbird. Possibly it's really obvious since I can't seem to find any instructions online on how to do it! Does anyone know how to do this?

Further background - I'm also struggling with the changes from XP to Win7, the whole "Library" thing is lost on me for now, and I'm unfamiliar with the best way to lay out files in the new system (any advice is welcome!). I installed Thunderbird 11.01, and it looks like by default it's setting up its "Local Directory" in

C:\Users\me\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\xinxgeub.default\Mail\pop-server.rr.com

where "me" is my username. I tried to read up on 'Roaming' vs. 'Local' vs. 'LocalLow' subdirectories for Application Data in Windows7, but I don't really get it. I did read something that said that putting a large email file in 'Roaming' would slow down the computer startup, and I have a lot of old emails, so should I change Thunderbird's default to the 'Local' version of the above path?

And going forward, should I be separating out or archiving my old email somehow? I've never tried archiving old email in Thunderbird because sometimes I need to search for an old message, but maybe I should be handling this differently.

This is just my home computer, and it's just me using it, so I should be able to keep things simple - I'm just unclear on what "simple" is! Thank you for any and all advice!