Replacing Notepad with Notepad2 on Windows 2003

GeekSpeak comments edit

This process has been posted for Windows XP SP2 and Vista, but I tried both of those to no avail on this Windows 2003 system I’m working on. The idea: Replace standard Windows Notepad with Notepad2.

What I did to get it working:

  1. Logged in as Administrator.
  2. Downloaded Notepad2, extracted Notepad2.exe to my desktop, and renamed it notepad.exe.
  3. From the Vista instructions, I changed the owner of the file to the Administrators group.
  4. Made a backup copy of the original notepad.exe in C:\WINDOWS.
  5. Ran a batch file to copy the notepad.exe from my desktop into the SEVEN locations I found it under in the C:\WINDOWS folder.

Only by copying it literally over all seven of the locations I found it did the change finally take. Here’s the batch script that I ran from my desktop:

copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\system32\dllcache\notepad.exe"
copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\system32\notepad.exe"
copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\notepad.exe"
copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\$NtServicePackUninstall$\notepad.exe"
copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\LastGood\notepad.exe"
copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\LastGood\system32\notepad.exe"
copy /y notepad.exe "%windir%\ServicePackFiles\i386\notepad.exe"

It felt like the nuclear option to me, but it was the only way to make it work. (Should you choose to do this, you do so at your own risk - I’m not responsible if the system feels like you’re hacking it and sucks you in like in Tron or something.)

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