[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