Windows Vista vs. Windows XP

Operating Systems

Operating Systems are computer programs that serve as the middle layer between the hardware and the applications software of the computer . The task of the operating system is to manage how different applications use the software and hardware resources of the computer . Also , the operating system is an abstraction layer between the hardware and the software serving to make the specific hardware implementation invisible to the application . Aside from managing the resources , another task for modern operating systems is providing a user interface for the operation of the computer

p In the past , computers didn 't have an operating system . The user would provide the program and the data to the hardware . The hardware then executed the program until the program ended or crashed . Computers could only execute one program at a time and programs were physically loaded (in the form of punch cards or magnetic tape ) into the computer

As computer hardware grew faster and applications for computers kept increasing , the process of manually loading a program on a machine that only runs one program at a time became increasingly impractical . The beginning of the modern operating system (OS ) was in response to this problem . The earliest traces of the OS could be seen in runtime libraries , programs that were executed before the first job of the computer . The runtime libraries would read in the customer job , control the execution , perform cleaning up of the resources after the customer job , record its usage then fetch and load the next customer job . This is the ancestor of the OS - a program that performs hardware management software-scheduling , and resource usage monitoring

With computes becoming more and more ubiquitous , more and more features were packed into the OS . In addition to the duties performed by its runtime library ancestor , Modern commercial OS 's especially for commercial users include utilities , basic applications (text editors media players , etc , user interfaces , and configuration tools among other things . From a program that simply managed the computer , modern OS 's take on the role of a program that is essential to make a computer usable

The main management responsibilities of a modern OS called services include the following

Process Management - At the most fundamental layer , a CPU can only execute a single program at any point in time , the OS being one of these programs . Modern OS support multitasking wherein the user could run multiple programs simultaneously (such as running a music player while typing on Microsoft Word . The OS job is to continuously switch the CPU from one program to the next , giving the user the impression that the programs are running in parallel

Memory Management - The OS manages the many types of memory available to the computer (CPU registers , cache , main memory , hard disk , making sure that it knows which memory is available for use , which memory is safe to overwrite . The OS is also responsible for moving data in between the different memory systems of the computer . The OS is also responsible for...