Replacing notepad.exe in Vista
Wednesday, May 02, 2007 1:27 AM
In his post, Omar directs us to a new version of Notepad2, which IMO is a must-have tool for anyone that does any heavy amount of text file editing. Although he covers how to replace notepad.exe on a machine running XP, I had to search for the same instructions for Vista. Courtesy of the HowToGeek, here they are:
1. Open up a privileged command line prompt
2. Take ownership of the old notepad.exe with takeown /f c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe
3. Grant yourself full control with cacls c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe /G <username>:F (replace <username> with your username)
4. Open explorer and replace the notepad.exe file with a renamed version of notepad2.exe.