The start menu used to manifest instantly.

The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”

A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.

It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.

The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.