Criticism of Windows Vista including Photoshop and WinRAR, also performed worse under Vista. Many low-to-mid-end machines that come with Windows Vista pre-installed suffer from exceptionally slow performance with the default Vista settings that come pre-loaded, and laptop manufacturers have offered to "downgrade" laptops to Windows XP—for a price. However, this "price" is unnecessary, as Microsoft allows users of Windows Vista and Windows 7 to freely "downgrade" their software by installing XP and then phoning a Microsoft representative for a new product key. When first released in November 2006, Vista performed file operations such as copying and deletion more slowly than other operating systems. Large
Microsoft Windows version history of Windows. Windows ME was conceived as a quick one-year project that served as a stopgap release between Windows 98 and Windows XP. Many of the new features were available from the Windows Update site as updates for older Windows versions ("System Restore" and "Windows Movie Maker" were exceptions). Windows ME was criticized for stability issues, as well as for lacking real mode DOS support, to the point of being referred to as the "Mistake Edition" or "Many Errors." Windows ME was the last operating system to be based on the Windows 9x (monolithic) kernel and MS-DOS. On October 25,