As do many others, and here’s a way to outright replace notepad with notepad2 on Windows XP - How to Replace Notepad.exe - Roland Weigelt. Get Notepad2 here. Even if you don’t crave for its added features (such as syntax highlighting, support for Unix & Linux formats, etc.) and wish to use it much like the original Notepad, you’ll appreciate its speed - it doesn’t get bogged down even if you open multi-megabyte text files. I’ve viewed and edited (log) files that are hundreds of megabytes with this little fella just fine.

Oh, if you don’t want it to replace notepad outright, it works as a standalone program as well. No installation required.