[aidanjt]

I find it suprising that there was no meantion of a text editor. Notepad is about as basic (and functionally useless) as text editors get. Any power-user worth his/her salt will always need a notepad replacement. Two of my favourites for windows are gvim and notepad++ (or context), with gvim being the more powerful of the two but with a high learning curve to use it proficantly.