can control panel settings be saved?

[mipak]

in the next week or so (the last time was 2 years in xp), i intend to re-partition & re-format my c:\drive and run a clean installation for w7 for the first time.

at the moment, i'm saving what needs to be saved and collecting the various drivers etc. for the motherboard. up till now, the only thing that i find tedious is having to go through the process of checking each of the half dozen or so commands within the 48 odd individual icons sitting in control panel.

from time to time, i've googled my question ... is it possible for all the different settings within control panel to be saved so that they can all be easily transferred to the 'new' control panel following a successful windows re-installation but i've never managed to spot the answer i've been looking for. perhaps it can't be done though i'd be very surprised if it couldn't in this so-called modern age.

to my mind, each of the numerous settings within control panel have to be stored somewhere. i was thinking of control.exe perhaps but if that were the case, i would have thought the date would have updated at each save but it's remained static since 14-7-2009, 4 years before i bought w7.

perhaps it's too simplistic to think that i could just copy control.exe to a flash drive or similar, do the installation then drag & drop the same .exe file back into its original (now new) folder which would overwrite the default settings in the new file.

so, i'd like to leave my question (above) open to the forum please in the hope i can save myself ages of re-setting cp controls. if anyone can help on this, it would be much appreciated.

 

[Ztruker]

You could try Windows Easy Transfer.

 

[mipak]

when i saw your suggestion to look at windows easy transfer, i thought 'great idea' so i read up about it and then got the programme up on screen. there were a number of choices and i opted for the 3rd. one ... an external hard disk or usb flash drive ... because my plan was to save the cp data to one of my other hard drives which wouldn't be affected by re-installation of the c:\ drive, in other words, c: to d:.

at this point, i really have no idea where the control panel settings are stored/saved. i'm assuming that it would be in control.exe which is in the c:\windows\system32 folder and even if they are there, i have no way of confirming that because, being an .exe file, clicking on it merely brings the control panel up on screen. i can't get inside to see the data and if i could, i wouldn't understand the code anyway. so there's a lot of uncertainty on a wobbly assumption.

staying with my assumption and going back to the wet programme, on expanding the choice of folders, c:\windows was clearly shown but i was not able to expand it further on to system32 and then to control.exe. thus i've come to a bit of a full stop to say the least.

still hoping for a solution though.