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Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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

But Windows 2000 was solid as well

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.)

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.

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

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

I casually use VirtualBox and GPU acceleration works.

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.

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