Replacing Notepad with Notepad2 on Vista

I hadn’t ever gotten around to replacing Notepad with the most-excellent Notepad2 until today and realized that the method outlined in my older post doesn’t work in Windows Vista due to heightened security.

To replace it on Vista, follow these steps:

1. Download Notepad2 and put it in a folder somewhere like C:\tools\Notepad2
2. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Windows\System32
3. Right-click on notepad.exe and go to Properties
4. Under the security tab, click Advanced.
5. Change the owner to MACHINE\Administrators
6. Close and re-open the properties box.
7. Go back to the security tab and click “Edit”
8. Give the Administrators group Full Control over the file.
9. Now go to a command prompt and type this:
   copy c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe.old
   copy c:\tools\notepad2\notepad2.exe c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe

Voila!  Now you should be back in business.

Now I’m back to wondering why they didn’t just make Notepad better in the first place…