I have a friend who has the problems for reading Chinese in Vista. Firstly, I think he tried to run an application written in Chinese Encode (Big5), not Unicode. Vista should support Unicode.Anyway,I have no problems to run any applications written in BIG5 at all. I am using Vista Ultimate and I remembered I have installed a chinese language pack.But he is using Vista Home Basic. We spent around half hour to look for the option or menu to install the chinse language I have. But we have not any successful outcomes. So, I believe that is not available for Home Basic.