Washington  - Windows 7 will roll out next month full of big promises and headline features, including greater speed, improved compatibility with existing applications, and an enhanced interface.

But sometimes it's the little surprises in a new operating system that are the most endearing.

That's because small fixes or enhancements can go a long way toward making your daily life with the PC more productive or more fun. Luckily, Windows 7 is full of them. Here are a few.

--- Drag and Snap

Windows 7 makes it easier to see and organise your running applications than any previous Windows version.

"Drag and snap," for example, is a new feature that will automatically "snap" running applications to the edge of your screen if you drag them there. It will also sense the presence of other applications displayed on screen and allow you easily to align them side-by-side by making the edge of one application snap to the edge of another.

An open application window can also be "snapped" quickly to the edge of the screen by pressing the Windows key and tapping either the left or right arrow key on your keyboard. Holding down the Windows key and tapping the up arrow key will maximise an open application, while the Windows key plus the down arrow will minimise the program to the task bar.

Taken together, these new methods of application organisation on screen will be of use to those who work with lots of applications open at the same time.

--- Enhanced Start button search

In Windows 7, you don't have to go far to find a program, file, or feature. All you need to do is open the Start menu and begin typing. While this was possible in Vista, Windows 7's Start menu search capabilities have been significantly enhanced to allow you to find features that previously were accessible only by opening the parent application.

For instance, type "performance" into the Start menu, and Windows 7 will show you not only the "performance monitor" application but also provide links to the "performance information and tools" section of the Control Panel as well as the subdialog box Performance Options, which allows you to determine whether windows are animated, Aero is activated, menus slide in and out of view, and much more. In short, you'll do a lot less digging around in Windows 7, trying to find a feature that you know exists but have forgotten where it is.

--- Taskbar status indicator

What's the worst thing about copying a bunch of files with Windows Explorer or downloading a large file with Internet Explorer? First of all, the "time remaining" indicator is usually grossly incorrect. Secondly, if you minimise the Explorer window that's doing the file copying, you have no way of knowing when the copy procedure is finished.

In Windows 7, a Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer window that's minimised and copying or downloading a lot of files will show you the status of the copy operation by turning progressively green as the files are copied. This is a handy way of seeing at a glance the status of your copy or download operation.

--- Well-behaved system tray

If you ever needed to know what it was like to be annoyed by pop- up messages, all you had to do was use Windows Vista for a while. The operating system drove people mad with steady reminders from the system tray about security issues, backups, program registrations and downloads, and much more.

Out of box, Windows 7 puts a stop to most of those annoyances, and by default it also cleans up the clutter in your system tray by being very choosy about which application or status icons are displayed permanently.

Even better, you can easily customise when an icon appears in the system tray, as well as when you're notified of a system event. Just click the "show hidden icons" arrow in the system tray, and then choose Customise. You'll get a dialog box that allows you to specify the behaviour of each icon represented. You can turn icons on or off, only display notifications, or never show notifications. You'll quickly wonder why this level of customisation wasn't included with the system tray from the outset.

--- Big screen delights

Monitors keep getting bigger and bigger. Resolutions keeps getting finer. But text and icons on those high-end screens just seem to get smaller.

In Windows 7, you don't have to choose between the highest resolution your LCD supports and legibility. Open Windows 7's Start menu, type "display," and select "change display settings." In the resulting dialog box, you'll see some options that will be a welcome sight to aging eyes, including "make text and other items larger or smaller." This feature gives you three settings for improving the legibility of on-screen text and icons: 100%, 125%, and 150%, with a preview of each.

That means you can use those large, hi-resolution monitors and still be able to read everything displayed.

You can also set a custom text size separate from other elements using the Custom DPI Setting panel. Here, you can choose to scale up the size of text to 125, 150, or 200 per cent of normal.

There are a host of other display-related enhancements in Windows 7, as well, including the ability to calibrate colour, determine which resolution is optimal for your monitor, and options to duplicate or extend your desktop onto a second monitor.

--- Jump lists

Jump lists are a new Windows 7 feature that allow you to open a recently-used application and a recently-open file with one click.

Recently-used program icons appeared in the top level of the Start menu in Windows Vista and, to some degree, also in Windows XP. But in Windows 7, a right-pointing arrow next to those program icons reveals a submenu of recently-opened files. Click on one of those files, and the application opens, along with the file you clicked. It's a small enhancement, but one that designed to cut down the number of clicks you have to make throughout your day.

--- Power Shell

In many ways, Windows 7 caters to the no-nonsense crowd - those computer users who favour functionality over glitz and productivity over pointless panache. Nowhere is this more evident than with the inclusion of Windows PowerShell and Windows PowerShell ISE. Both are superpowered command line tools that will make veteran DOS or UNIX buffs happy.

There are many more small but unheralded improvement in Windows 7 that you'll no doubt discover on your own. For instance, if you regularly rename files by highlighting them and pressing F2, you'll find that this action no longer highlights the entire file name, extension included, because typically you do not want to rename the extension of a file. Doing so will render it unidentifiable by the application needed to open it. So in Windows 7, pressing F2 on a highlighted file simply highlights the part of the name before the extension.

One walks away from Windows 7 with the impression that Microsoft spent as much time on details this time around as it did on headline-grabbing features. And that, for a change, is good news. (dpa)