Chinese in Windows 2000 works well. It is included in the W2K installer disk and can be set up via the "Regional Options" control panel. (I personally find the set-up rather weird... but opnce you get the hang of it, it does work extremely well!

This is what we pass out to faculty and students who want to install it themselves:

Installing and Using Chinese (traditional and simplified) under Windows 2000

The standard Windows 2000 installation does not include Chinese or other languages that require special fonts or "IME's" (Input Method Editors). The following is an example for the installation of Chinese. Follow the same procedure for Japanese, Korean, and other languages that are included on the W2K installer disk. During most installations, therefore, you should have the installer disk available.

The installation should be done as administrator. The installation has to be repeated for individual accounts.

There are many choices available during this installation. These instructions refer only to the installation of Pinyin (Phonetic) input for Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Installing Simplified and Traditional Chinese 

1.  Go to the Control Panel "Regional Option"
2. Click Tab "Input Locales"
3. Click "Add..." 
4. Scroll in "Add Input Locale/Input locale" to "Chinese (PRC)"
5. Scroll in "Add Input Locale/Keyboard layout/IME" to "Chinese (Simplified)-MS  PinYin98"
6. Click "OK"
7. Click "Apply"

These steps should have installed the MS Pinyin IME 2.0 - now available as a second choice when selecting "EN" (listed in Chinese characters with "2.0" preceding the last Chinese character. There is also a separate taskbar on the lower left for Chinese now.

Using Simplified and Traditional Chinese

Start MS Word, select the IME 2.0 by clicking on the "EN" icon lower right and scrolling to the IME2.0 (all in Chinese characters except for the numbers!) - type in "bei", hit the spacebar, type in "jing", hit the spacebar  - you should now see the two characters for Beijing.