Embarrassingly elementary question - Notepad and line breaks

For simple text files, I've just always used Notepad. Lots of better things out there, but Notepad comes with Windows, so I've rolled with it.

Now that I'm using Windows 7 - and I don't even remember if Notepad came with it, or if I went out and "found" it somewhere - I'm having the following odd problem.

I update content for a web site for a nonprofit for which I volunteer. When I take html or php files that were (presumably) created in XP and open them with Notepad in Windows 7, the line breaks are gone. The text just streams together unreadably. The pages render fine in a web browser, but they're wretched to edit or look at the source.

I've worked around this so far by viewing the page source from my browser, then copying and pasting it back into the source file, and then the breaks are intact and Windows 7 Notepad displays it correctly. But that won't work for a php file, because the "source" one sees on the web isn't the exact source of the original php file.

Sorry, this isn't a web/html/php question. Just wondering if XP Notepad and Win7 Notepad are incompatible enough to cause this, and more importantly, what's the "path of least resistance" in terms of a good text editor to use (ideally one provided with Windows, although I have no problem finding and installing freeware editors - I'd just think Microsoft had a solution here)?

I haven't seen the behaviour you're describing, but then haven't edited a webpage in forever.

I'd use Arachnophilia from arachnoid.com. When I was doing HTML, I liked it best as an HTML editor.

As far as text editors, I've been using, and am happy with, a program called JEdit from jedit.org. One word of caution though; J Edit is a "Unix like" text editor, so you won't be able to edit with notepad without doing a lot of manual reformatting once you've used J Edit.