transfer contacts to SIM card

Howdy. I spent all day yesterday trying to reply to this, but the reply box wouldn't load. If I was paranoid I'd swear Microsoft was out to get me!

Yes you certainly would expect that the contacts would still be on the SIM, but I promise you they're not. I am certain that they were on the SIM when I put it in the phone because my last phone died when the touch screen stopped working and I couldn't retrieve anything that wasn't on the SIM, but luckily most of my contacts were on it. I assumed they would still be there and only found out that they're not when I put it into the new phone.

As to the reason I opened two accounts... well it's a long and boring story of my brain getting more and more addled over the course of several days as I tried to figure out how to do this seemingly simple thing. When I typed Windows Live into Google lots of different things came up: Hotmail; Outlook; Messenger... After much downloading of pointless things I signed up for a Hotmail account but the screenshot didn't look anything like the one in the YouTube tutorial about how to transfer contacts and then it turned out I already had one but it hadn't been activated, so now I have two. They do seem to be different though; in the settings menu on my Windows phone the first account only offers the option to sync emails, whereas the second one has the option to sync contacts, calender and tasks, but as I used the same email and password for both of them I don't know which one I'm signing into... it is most perplexing.

The account that my phone is associated with is a Gmail account and I tried for at least half a day to find my contacts in that, but it only has emails, no phone numbers, unless they are very well hidden, which is certainly possible. The new Gmail setting has loads of completely unnecessary pages and options and I don't know or care what most of them are for.

I appreciate that you are trying to help. I feel like a total dunce and if you could explain to me how this works you would have my sternal gratitude!

I am heartily in agreement about the smashing with a hammer directive! However, I can't do that while my contacts are still inaccessible and I'm starting to think I may have to go back to the traditional pen and paper option and spend the next few weeks getting thousands of contacts' information into a format in which I can access it.

I have spent the past three days trying to figure out how to sync my contacts onto ANYTHING that will transfer them onto my new phone, I have opened two Windows Live accounts, neither of which I want and both of which are confusing and un-navigable. Some of the contact information has been transferred, but most of the phone numbers, which are what I want, have not, and I can't see any way to tell the damn thing to transfer the phone numbers.

All the contacts were on my SIM card when I made the drastic and terrible mistake of getting the Windows phone and now they are not on it and there is no way to get them back there.

What is the great secret of getting ALL the contact information from the phone onto the Windows Live account, from whence I will then try to figure out how to download them onto another phone so I can get them back on my SIM card which is where I want them and delete the stupid, pointless and cumbersome Windows Live accounts and never EVER have anything to do with Windows again?

BTW I'm not computer illiterate, in fact I'm one of those people other people often consult when they don't know how to do something. This problem has me completely stumped. Thank all the deities in the universe it wasn't my mother who bought this phone!