IMO, the apex of Windows was WinXP.

WinXP was just a reskinned Windows 2000... which was the actual apex of Windows UIs ;P

Windows XP and Windows 7, although with a lack of consistency (compared to macOS) was great for getting things done and powerfull on even low hardware (I liked how it disable areo effects if you did not have the GPU for it).

I remember it very differently. You could often watch interfaces be drawn line-by-line and box-by-box, with many pixels getting redrawn multiple times before it was finished. Buttons responded to clicks, as long as you waited. The information layout was good though.

I would say your comment makes more sense for Windows 2000.

what were you using as pc? a moka pot?

windows '98 - even on a semi decent machine - was fast

Windows 98 was quite a step up in polish and performance from Windows 95, even on the same hardware. Windows 2000 was an even bigger step up in polish, but more resource hungry.

Exactly, Windows 98. Windows 95 was like the beta version, where all the functionality was there but did not work most of the time.

Remember that was the era of single processor PCs, if you had a really demanding CPU hog you generally had to forget about trying to multitask as the experience would be painful. If you had something like file compression happening (which could also occupy the HDD) it'd leave little for the UI redrawing, and this is also long before that aspect was accelerated

right, but you can also bring a modern system to its knees with a high enough load. the new systems suck by default. keyboard response time is much higher than ever because of the accumulation of abstraction strata.

> You could often watch interfaces be drawn line-by-line

On a CPU system fast enough to render it within a frame, you could switch that animation off. I think it was mostly there to preserve UI compatibility with potatoes.

> You could often watch interfaces be drawn line-by-line and box-by-box, with many pixels getting redrawn multiple times before it was finished.

Maybe if you ran Windows 95 on a 386 with 4MB of RAM.