Vista notepad and Chinese characters

I have a bunch of old notepad files saved in Chinese from my old XP system. Now I am using Vista, notepad can't seem to recognize Chinese characters properly, everything is in some weird code.

I have Chinese language support turned on, both simplified and traditional.

Can anyone help? Thanks

 

what happens if you open the files in wordpad or another editor?
Which encoding are they saved in? (ANSI/UTF8/something else)

Most likely, Notepad just can't guess the encoding. You should be able to specify this explicitly when opening the file (at least under XP, the open file dialog has a dropdown menu to pick encoding)

 

When I open up these files in MS Word, everything is displayed properly.

I remember under XP, in the "Regions, languages" section, there is an option to "extend advanced text services to all programs (besides MS Word)." And when that option is turned on, notepad displayed all Chinese characters correctly. Now I am running Vista, I no longer see this option, and notepad can't display Chinese characters properly.

This is really strange. It's as if Microsoft left out this option in Vista.

 

have you tried "regional and language options"->"administrative"->"change system locale"?

 

I did. Notepad still can't display Chinese characters properly.

The weird thing is, I can type Chinese directly into notepad, and save it, and then open it up, everything turns out fine.

But when I use notepad to open up txt documents I created under XP (before I upgraded to Vista), notepad cannot display the Chinese characters in these documents correctly.