TextPad is probably the best way to replace your Windows' default NotePad with sophisticated text editor that doesn't require much resources and does exactly what you want. Most of the tasks that people do with Microsoft Word are something that actually don't require word processing software, but a light-weight text editor instead -- TextPad replaces Word in these tasks for basic users very well.

TextPad's main users are definitely programmers and HTML taggers, who normally rank this little software as their most valuable tool ever.

Software includes tons and tons of nice features -- some of the most valuable ones that you can only appreciate when you need it, are spell checking, comparing of two documents, global search/replace acrosss multiple documents, regexp searches, fully configurable highlighting for tags/commands/etc, macros, etc.

Software is shareware, but only small nag screen is there to remind you about this fact if you use the trial version -- no features are removed in trial version. Definately worth the $30 what it costs to get a single-user license.