WinXP SP2 - How to Replace Notepad.exe
Installing SP2 brought back good ol' Notepad... what a shock. So I performed my usual steps for replacing Notepad with Florian Balmer's excellent Notepad2:
- Create backup copy of
c:\WINDOWS\notepad.exe - Change Explorer view options to show system files
- In temporary folder: Prepare new
notepad.exe. - Copy the EXE into the clipboard
- Open folder
C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache in Explorer - Ctrl-V, Backspace
- Ctrl-V, Backspace
- Ctrl-V, Backspace
- Answer the "insert WinXP CD" dialog so Notepad won't be reverted to the original version.
But this time the dialog didn't appear and after a few seconds Notepad was changed back to the original (huh, what original? Didn't I just overwrite the version in the dllcache directory?).
Well, with SP2 there's a Notepad.exe in C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 that will overwrite the replaced versions. After creating a backup copy of C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386\Notepad.exe and replacing this file with the new EXE I tried to replace Notepad again -- with success (even though no dialogs appeared).
Update 2007-07-31: My colleague Jens Schaller has posted a how-to for replacing Notepad on Windows Vista.