Microsoft Windows version history home users. Windows 2000 was available in four editions: In September 2000, Microsoft released a successor to Windows 98 called Windows ME, short for "Millennium Edition". It was the last DOS-based operating system from Microsoft. Windows ME introduced a new multimedia-editing application called Windows Movie Maker, came standard with Internet Explorer 5.5 and Windows Media Player 7, and debuted the first version of System Restore – a recovery utility that enables the operating system to revert system files back to a prior date and time. System Restore was a notable feature that would continue to thrive in all later versions
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