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Explain The Purpose Of An Operating System

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Explain the purpose of an Operating System: Operating Systems manage hardware and provide services for application software; this means that it makes it easier for users to interact with different software and hardware available on the computer. The most common operating systems are Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. While each OS is different, they all provide a graphical user interface GUI a GUI allows users to click and drag objects with a mouse instead of entering text at a command line. Characteristics of an Operating System: Multi-User allows multiple users to use the same computer at the same time or different times. The most common and most well known OS that use s multi-user is Windows 7. Multitasking is performing more than one task at the same time, a task being a program. Multiprocessing is the support of more than one processor at the same time. Applications in a multi-processing system are broken into smaller routines that run by themselves. Multithreading is the operating system process to manage its use by more than one user at a time or manage multiple tasks by the same user without having the need of multiple copies of the program running on the computer. GUI (Graphical User Interface) allows users to click and drag objects with a mouse instead of entering text at a command line. A GUI uses windows, icons, and menus to carry out commands for instance opening files, deleting files, and moving files. Main four functions of an Operating System: • Control

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