Lifehacker posted a Songbird screencast (media player based on the Firefox codebase), eliciting a bunch of "not ready for prime time" comments, but boy, it looks like it's going to be awfully tasty when it's through baking.

I recently upgraded my machine and had been too lazy to replace Windows Notepad with the vastly superior Notepad2, but I just can't live like this any more. Here are instructions for completely replacing notepad.

UPDATE: Okay, neither method worked. Windows XP is like the liquid metal Terminator. You punch it in the face, but your fist goes right through, it reforms elsewhere, and then rips your arm off for your troubles and beats you to death with it. Trying these instructions next.

UPDATE 2: No love. I tried the batch file and everything. I don't seem to have a "ServicePackFiles" directory. While I was searching for it I noticed that damn Microsoft dog reads his book backwards, though.

Great, not only is a dog helping me search, the fucker can't even read.

UPDATE 3: Ah ha! While I didn't have a ServicePackFiles directory, there was a copy of notepad.exe sitting in c:\i386. When I included that in the batch script, that finally did the trick. So here's what worked for me:

1. Download Notepad2.
2. Unzip Notepad2.exe to somewhere.
3. Rename it to Notepad.exe.
4. Create a batch file in the same directory as the renamed Notepad.exe with these contents:

   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32\dllcache
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\i386
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32
   copy /-y notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS

5. Hit "y" then ENTER quickly in succession to confirm all the copies.

That should do the trick. If it doesn't, and if none of the other links above do the trick, you have my permission to weep quietly. Only other thing I can suggest is searching your whole drive (don't forget to allow searching of system files) for *notepad*. Add any locations you find to the batch file.

No guarantees, of course. You never know what's going to break Windows forever. Follow at your own risk.

I have wished for a free utility like this on many an occasion, and now my wish has come true!