In my endless quest/obsession to find the perfect information manager, I've decided that one of the key features for me is reliable web page capture. Not pixel perfect. But close enough. There are lots of other features I'm willing to compromise on, but not that one.

Now you wouldn't think that would be a problem. But it is. Most of the information managers we know and love just are not as reliable as they should be. I have licences for three of the best -- Ultra Recall, Surfulater and Evernote. All claim that web page capture is part of their feature set.

And yet compared to the free Firefox add-on Scrapbook, their performance is variable, to say the least. Pictures speak louder than words, so here's a comparison of the three programs I mention above with Scrapbook, and web capture specialists Local Website Archive and WebResearch Pro.

I took a page from a mainstream site (BBC News) that I knew would present a decent challenge.

(original page in Firefox)

(Scrapbook) (Local Website Archive) (WebResearch Pro)

(Ultra Recall) (Surfulater) (Evernote)

As you can see the three programs that major on web page capture do an excellent job. Scrapbook is faultless as ever.

Ultra Recall, Surfulater and Evernote are all ugly and broken. Yes, all the content is there, but it's not as pleasant or easy to read, and not recognizable as the original page.

If a free browser add-on can manage faultless web capture, I can't see why the power user information managers can't do the same. Web Research Pro takes a lazy (but very clever) route to perfect pages -- it uses the Scrapbook engine to capture pages. Why can't other programs do the same thing?

I'm trying to reduce the number of programs I use. I want to use one program for web capture and information management. Seems logical and should be achievable. But I'm still looking...

EDIT: A new version of Ultra Recall improves web page capture -- see further post below.

The free version of Netlimiter should do what you need (monitoring and a stats report).
http://www.netlimiter.com

Curt: is there any real reason you want to replace notepad.exe , instead of simply changing .txt filetype association to use your other editor? That's a much simpler & cleaner way of handling things...

-f0dder (April 02, 2008, 05:12 PM)

Changing the .txt file association will of course take care of most uses of Notepad.  The only problem is those programs that are hard-coded to call notepad.exe when they open a text file (there's a surprisingly large number -- that why I did exactly what the original poster is talking about and replaced notepad.exe with metapad.exe).

So, Curt, if you do really want to make sure that the original notepad.exe is never called by another program, then yes, there is no way around the long-winded technique described on Metapad's help pages. Or use a batch file as advised by edbro above.