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
Windows Vista startup process kernel. Windows Vista introduces a complete overhaul of the Windows operating system loader architecture. The earliest known reference to this revised architecture is included within PowerPoint slides distributed by Microsoft during the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference of 2004 when the operating system was codenamed "Longhorn." This documentation mentions that the Windows operating system loader would be undergoing a significant restructuring in order to support EFI and to "do some major overhaul of legacy code." The new boot architecture completely replaces the NTLDR architecture used in previous versions of Windows NT. Boot Configuration Data (BCD) is a firmware-independent database for boot-time