Mr N

The problem is that Windows protects many of its utility files located under the c:\windows or c:\winnt directory. Each time you overwrite one it gets deleted and replaced with a protected version under Windows control. So how do we get around it? Rest assured the answer is here. Special thanks go to Omar Shahine’s WebLog for providing the solution. It took me a while to find it, so hopefully this one will contain more of the words you are looking for. Window’s default text editor is notepad so we are going to rename our favourite text editor to the same name. move notepad2.exe notepad.exe Open a command window and run the following batch commands to rename the orginal notepad files and copy in the new version. cd <locate of your version of notepad> move %WINDIR%\system32\dllcache\notepad.exe %WINDIR%\system32\dllcache\notepad_orginal.exe copy notepad.exe %WINDIR%\system32\dllcache move %WINDIR%\system32\notepad.exe %WINDIR%\system32\notepad_orginal.exe copy notepad.exe %WINDIR%\system32 move %WINDIR%\notepad.exe %WINDIR%\notepad_orginal.exe copy notepad.exe %WINDIR% A message to the effect of “Files that are required for Windows to run have been replaced…” pops up for each file that is replaced. This is Windows noticing that the notepad is different so just click cancel, and confirm that you are sure. Windows accepts the change and doesn’t ask again. If you are upgrading then run the following : move notepad2.exe notepad.exe del /f %WINDIR%\notepad.exe copy notepad.exe %WINDIR% del /f %WINDIR%\system32\dllcache\notepad.exe copy notepad.exe %WINDIR%\system32\dllcache del /f %WINDIR%\system32\notepad.exe copy notepad.exe %WINDIR%\system32 Note: Some versions of Windows are funny about replacing notepad and even replacing the copy in the ddlcache eventually changes back to the original notepad. I did a search and found all these copies of notepad. Add the following lines to a file called install.bat and run it. copy /y notepad2.exe %WINDIR%\system32\dllcache\notepad.exe copy /y notepad2.exe %WINDIR%\system32\notepad.exe copy /y notepad2.exe %WINDIR%\notepad.exe copy /y notepad2.exe %WINDIR%\LastGood\notepad.exe copy /y notepad2.exe %WINDIR%\LastGood\system32\notepad.exe copy /y notepad2.exe %WINDIR%\ServicePackFiles\i386\notepad.exe Better explanation here: http://www.flos-freeware.ch/doc/notepad2-Replacement.html Or even simpler you can use Binary Fortress’ Notepad Replacer which you can download for free: http://www.binaryfortress.com/NotepadReplacer/

I have been looking for Firefox plugins which will allow me to launch plain text urls which don’t have web hyperlinks and thought I would share my discoveries with you. I suppose I should have read the Firefox manual before setting out on my search, but you know how that goes. Looks like Adam Pash did, because he wrote about some of Firefox’s built in features - or maybe he just read it from someone else’s blog! I don’t think anyone reads manuals any more. If its not in a FAQ then no one seams to know about it. Anyway, I digress. In Firefox, you can select text and drag it to the address bar. If the string starts with a protocol (e.g. http) then it will automagically direct the browser’s current tab to go there. This also works with the Google search bar; dragging text to the google box automagically does a search. Neat. I found this feature pretty good but I wanted to launch it in a different tab. Often I am reading a (possibly text) document, which I would like to continue reading and come across an unlinked link. And thus my search starts. I found Jeff Chien’s Fetch Text URL which is a nice little Firefox plugin which spots you have highlighted some text and offers you 3 options. “Fetch url in current tab", “Fetch url in new tab” and “Fetch url in new window". Each one of these is turn off and onable, and it works pretty well.

Try searching for Plesk and Blackberry to find information on configuring Plesk to forward incoming email to a Blackberry device. There is so much Blackberry chaff that you can’t see the wheat. Fear not I to here to help. The problem is that I need to set up the mail server to accept the mail into a users mail box then forward a copy of the mail to another email address. In my previous experience “Forwarding” a mail does not leave a copy - it just forwards it. After much reading I figured out the the facility I needed is called “Redirect". It seems obvious now, but like I said, there isn’t any documentation. The true “Forwarding” facility does not seem to be supported under Plesk - well I can’t find any documentation which suggests it is.

Window’s Notepad is actually a nice lightweight text viewing application. Unfortunately, it has several major draw backs.

• Horizontal scroll bar does not work on large files
• Takes a lot of time and memory to load large files
• Changing word wrapping on and off reloads the file, no good for large files
• Does not handle Unix files

I have been searching for a suitable replacement for sometime. My only criteria were that it was lightweight and it only displayed 1 file (i.e. no tabs). Metapad was pretty close, but it wasn’t great at large files. It’s not really supported any more as it is kind of feature complete. Next I tried Notepad++ which had more features. The most annoying thing was the tabbed windows. When one associates a helper program with a text file, I like to get one application per file so that I can deal with them separately. One just seemed to spend all of one’s time switching between tabs with the mouse because the tab switcher wasn’t any good. I’m used to ALT+TAB so having to switch to ALT+CTRL+TAB while in one application was cumbersome. The final problem was that it had a huge memory footprint of 10MB+ depending on how many files you had loaded and it did start to grind. But, now I think my quest is over, with Notepad2. The entire application is only 248K. Here are the speed tests. The test was done with a text file 100MB long. The file was preloaded so that it was in the disc cache (i.e. not freshly loaded from disc on the first test and loaded from disc cache on the second test).

	Notepad2	Notepad
Load time (sec)	3	17
Change text to wrap (sec)	2 first time, 0 after	50

Well the results speak for themselves.

Simon Pegg is doing awfully well, isn’t he. Thought I’d get back to basics and watch the first series of Spaced again. Couple of minutes in and I was crying with laughter. With all of his success in recent times I’d forgotten how funny it was.

Duane: You know what they say about Love and War? Tim: Yes, one is filled with psychological and physical pain, and the other one is war.