operating systems

operating systems

1. Drive

   • a piece of software used to control a piece of hardware
   • drivers allow a peripheral device to be connected to a computer and it be used by an operating system
     • drivers are OS specific and are regularly updated by companies
   • you may get drivers for graphics cards,mouse,sound card,network interface card.

2. peripheral management

   • operating systems manage the way in which hardware interacts with sofware
   • a peripheral is a piece of a piece of hardware that is not directly connected to the CPU- such as a keyboard a mouse or even a hard disk drive
   • an operating system managed all of the peripheral devices that are connected to the computer this allows them to be disabled or drives be updated

3. file management

   • like memory management the operating system must identify where files are stored for long term storage on for the hard disk drive or a solid state drive.
   • the user does not need to know the specific track sector and surface address but the operating system does in order to accurately locate a file on the hard disk drive

4. what is systems software?

   • systems software is a type of software that controls the computer hardware
   • it provides an interface between the user of the computer and the hardware
   • an operating system is a type of systems software

5. multitasking

   • if the tasks were split like this we would have to wait until all task A is complete before completing task B. this mean that we will not have issues when sharing resources but could make some takes appear to take a very long time to execute.
   • by giving the processor a small time slice for each task means that all task appear to be executing at the same time
   • to thew user it appears that we can multitask and have lots of programs open at once