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I'm moving from an old Windows 7 installation to a new Windows 7 installation.
I want to move my registry settings over to the new Windows 7 installation.
I have the same set of programs installed on both computers, but the hardware is different, so I suspect that simply copying over the registry won't be a good idea.
Is there any way to merge the registry settings from the old Windows 7 installation with that of the new Windows 7 installation, without simply overwriting the registry on the newer installation?
I tried exporting the registry using RegEdit, but the text file it generates is massive (the file reached over 30 gigabytes before I ran out of disk space and had to terminate the process). Anyone know of a better way?
Locomotion
Posted 2012-10-11T00:56:39.900
Reputation: 21
Why would you want to do this? – Dave M – 2012-10-11T01:03:21.513
If you can move registry settings over along with program files, you'd be able to easily migrate to a new installation without having to reinstall and reconfigure all of your programs. (Assuming that the hardware on the new computer is sufficiently similar to that of the old computer such that the same settings would work on both.) – Locomotion – 2012-10-11T01:07:53.557
This would be preferable over simply cloning the disk if you had some programs or settings on the newer computer that you would like to preserve as well. – Locomotion – 2012-10-11T01:08:54.227
1There's no way to blindly do this en masse without messing up your new install (even on a per app basis, and even if you were able to locate all keys/values involved, it may still not work properly). – Karan – 2012-10-11T01:12:38.507
See also http://superuser.com/questions/486157/how-to-merge-windows-registry-hives-directly-without-converting-them-to-an-inter
– bwDraco – 2012-10-11T04:46:06.007