I’d already switched away, but 7 seemed like the peak in an absolute sense. XP might have been the biggest relative improvement or the best normalized to the competition, but Windows 7 was the last version before development started going backwards.

I actually preferred Vista - there were a bunch of things I thought 7 made worse:

- in explorer, Vista could show column headers in all views (not just details) making it easy to sort/group

- you could use the headers to set grouping

- grouping still showed all the files

- the left tree became buggy in Windows 7, it doesn't always scroll to the current folder (I think it's broken to this day)

- the "quick access" shortcuts in explorer (the top list) was its own section (so you could always click it) -- in 7 and later it is part of the tree so you have to scroll back up to use it

- dragging files into a folder in 7+ instantly sorts them in the view, rather than keeping them together until hitting F5

- windows media player got rid of "find in library", "recently added" playlist, "play all", the taskbar miniplayer

- Vista had peak taskbar tray. instead of the current all-or-nothing overflow thing, overflow icons would automatically show themselves and then hide again

- can't run Explorer as administrator anymore to temporarily access protected files

- movie maker gone, dvd maker gone, sidebar gone