Operational Essentials: Windows
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Written by admin on July 24, 2008 – 9:35 pm
It would be hard to find a computer user who hasn’t been exposed to Windows - the operating system for PCs and PC-based laptops. (A small slice of the computer world uses Linux, which is the same idea, differently expressed; Apple users use that company’s equivalent.) But relatively few users understand the real purpose of the operating system and its interrelation with the hardware and software that sit (in logical terms) below and above it. Let me try to explain. The job of Windows is to:
- Manage the hardware. Windows sits between the hardware and your applications with hooks into each. When a piece of software - a word processor, for example - wants to load a file into memory for editing, Windows receives the request and translates it into a command that the hardware can fulfill. Hardware must fit within certain specifications in order to work with PC motherboards and processors, but various components have differing capabilities; manufacturers develop a small piece of code called a driver that identifies hardware to the operating system.
- Manage the software. Similarly, software developers have a fairly wide latitude in the sort of tasks they can assign to their programs. However, there has to be a way for a single piece of software to interact uniformly with the nearly infinite combinations of hardware that exist within computers.
The job of Windows is to adapt the software commands to what it knows about the capabilities of the hardware. Windows also allocates the use of the computer’s memory and processor time so that various programs can coexist without conflicts and crashes. (Do I hear a guffaw out there? I’m with you . . . but it’s true that with each successive release and update of Windows, the number of system crashes and other failures has gone down. May we all live to celebrate the extermination of the final bug.)
- Manage the files. If you have a hard time this morning remembering where you put your keys, consider the fact that a typical computer has to remember the location of tens or hundreds of thousands of programs, snippets of information, and complete files. (I run an antivirus check on my computer once a week; the last time it found 262,384 files worth checking.) Windows oversees the creation and management of a set of interlocked tables and indexes of files. It’s all invisible to you, but oh so important.
- Show a pretty (and simpler) face. For most users, this is what it’s all about: Putting lipstick on an electronic pig. Those of us old enough to have used computers before the introduction of Windows (or Apple’s Macintosh operating system) remember that the screen was harsh and black. The machine sat there stubbornly presenting nothing more than a command prompt, a flashing dash that demanded that you, the user, tell it what to do. It was your job to type in the proper command to launch a program, format a disk, or copy or rename a file.
The arrival of Windows put a GUI (pronounced gooey) on the screen: a graphical user interface. A mouse or other pointing device was presented and allowed to click here, pick up and move something there, and even draw on the screen. Beneath that GUI, Windows translates it all into commands to the hardware and software.
