Criticism of Windows Vista Criticism of Windows Vista Windows Vista, an operating system released by Microsoft for consumers on January 30, 2007, has been widely criticized by reviewers and users. Due to issues with new security features, performance, driver support and product activation, Windows Vista has been the subject of a number of negative assessments by various groups. For security reasons, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista (and of Windows 7 as well) allow only signed drivers to be installed in kernel mode. Because code executing in kernel mode enjoys wide privileges on the system, the signing requirement aims to ensure that only code with
Windows NT startup process loader loads the contents of the file (which is a compressed version of a physical memory dump of the machine) into memory and restores the computer to the state that it was prior to hibernation. Next, the boot loader looks for a list of installed operating system entries. If more than one operating system is installed, the boot loader shows a boot menu and allow the user to select an operating system. If a non NT-based operating system such as Windows 98 is selected (specified by an MS-DOS style of path, e.g. C:\), then the boot loader loads the associated