Criticism of Windows Vista soon picked up by international media outlets: "Jornal de Notícias", Rádio e Televisão de Portugal, "La Nación", "The Chosun Ilbo", and 163.com. 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.
Criticism of Windows Vista SPP's predecessor, and given at least one temporary validation server outage which reportedly flagged many legitimate copies of Vista and XP as "Non-Genuine" when Windows Update would "check in" and fail the "validation" challenge. Microsoft altered SPP significantly in Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Instead of the reduced-functionality mode, installations of Vista left unactivated for 30 days present users with a nag screen which prompts them to activate the operating system when they log in, change the desktop to a solid black colour every hour, and periodically use notification balloons to warn users about software counterfeiting. In addition, updates classified