How to bring back old Notepad/Paint and Calculator on Windows 11

If you installed Windows 11 and you are like me, then you don’t like the new Notepad and Paint.

I extract them out from Windows 7, and it turns out, they work perfectly fine on Windows 11.

You can download them from here: https://blog.mdavid626.com/assets/windows7_notepad_mspaint_calc.zip

You could extract the zip into a folder and run them from there. Don’t forget about the .mui files (in the en-US folder). They are necessary for the apps to run.

I did disable the App aliases and uninstalled the new versions of Notepad and Paint. For Notepad this already brings back the old version, which might be already good enough to use. I also disabled the App aliases in Settings -> Apps -> Advanced App Settings -> App execution aliases for Notepad and Paint.

You could place mspaint.exe into C:\Windows\system32. As mentioned above don’t forget to copy the .mui files.

It’s a bit more complicated with calc.exe as the original owner of the file is set to TrustedInstaller, so it won’t allow you to override/rename the file. You can change the owner to Administrators or Users. Then assign full control of the file to yourself, and you’ll be able to override (or rename) the file.

Dávid Molnár's Picture

About Dávid Molnár

Stack Software Engineer at oculai GmbH

Munich, Germany https://mdavid626.com

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