I had a document the other day that I needed to search through on my Windows laptop and find specific number combinations that started with a specific three digits and ended with another digit. For example I had a list of thousands of numbers and needed to find any number that matched 333xxx4 where the xxx could be any number combination. At first I wasn’t sure what application I should use on Windows but then I remembered that Notepad++ had regular expression search and replace support. Below is an example of searching for the combination I mention above along with a list of other regular expressions that can be used for matching variables in documents opened with Notepad++.

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I wasn’t sure if Notepad++ was going to install properly on my new laptop running Windows 7 64-Bit. After the initial installation of Notepad++ I was receiving an error that I assumed must be related to the fact that this was a 64-Bit OS and not a 32-Bit OS. The issue ended up being a silly mistake on my end and was very easy to resolve. Below I explain the error along with how to resolve the error. This should resolve the problem on any version of Windows regardless of if the OS is 64-Bit or 32-Bit.

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Spell check is not installed on Windows Notepad++ by default so to make it work you actually have to install a third party application called Aspell. To check and see if Aspell is installed on your Notepad++ version simply open a new document, write a sentence, and then click the spell check button which is shown in the image below.

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In the process of troubleshooting a problem with mysqldump I was viewing MySQL backups using Notepad++. I typically view and edit large files using Linux with vi however in this scenario it was more convenient to view the files quickly from a Windows laptop using Notepad++. The first couple of backups were between 50MB and 100MB and while they were a bit slow to open with Notepad++ they did open without further issue and provided an easy method to search through the files.

Eventually I backed up a database file that ended up being 195MB of pure SQL such as mydatabase.sql. When attempting to open this file with Notepad++ I received the below error.

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If you need to add a local DNS entry to your Windows Vista PC you will first need to know the location of the “hosts” file which is where you should add the local entries. It might be necessary to add local entries if you want to direct traffic from the Vista PC to a device on your local network by name instead of IP address.

Windows Vista hosts File Location: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

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