[ahartmetz]

Yes, 2000 was by far my favorite Windows. Very solid, very clean style. I have a burning hatred for the visual design of Windows 7 (and Vista to a lesser degree) - it may have been technically great, but the design felt appropriate for a toothpaste, not for an operating system. I could only stand XP with the 2000 style as well. What the hell were they thinking?

[mrighele]

I consider Windows 2000 the top that Microsoft reached with regard to style (both look and feel).

But you can choose "Windows Classic" as a style in Windows 7 and it will not to be too different, although some thing may be annoying.

For example, Windows 2000 was more keyboard-friendly. In Explorer, you edit the path on the top input, then you tab and you move between files. Since Windows XP that has been increasing, and its 5 tabs in Windows 7. Pratically unusable

The control panel is not yet fucked up like in Windows 8+ but still you can guess the year in which the entry was written.

On the other side, the start menu is better because you have a search field that works well (no web stupid web searches there).

[KMag]

My chief complaint about Win7 is how much slower it seemed to perform than Win2k on late 90s/early 2000s hardware / on a virtual machine. (Also, IIRC, the licensing terms for Win2k were better regarding running on virtual machines.)

[ihatepython]

For me, peak Windows in terms of style was Windows 3.1 with the Hotdog Stand theme.

But Windows 2000 was solid as well

[kevin_thibedeau]

You can switch Win7 to classic theme and pretend it's an improved Win95. That's what I do in my VMs since I don't need to be burning cycles and RAM on eyecandy.

[supertrope]

Ironically in Vista and newer the GUI is GPU accelerated and switching to the classic theme switches from GPU acceleration to CPU rendered.

[froggit]

But isn't this somewhat moot in a lot of VMs considering they often lack GPU acceleration?

[supertrope]

I casually use VirtualBox and GPU acceleration works.

[rzzzt]

The theme in Windows 2000 and its classic counterpart in XP 64-bit used a darker shade of blue for the background, which I always tried to hand-select on the systems that I had (and weren't running these versions).

There was also some tiny difference between the active window colors as well, IIRC.