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Essay / Using Windows XP - 1532
Kinardi IsnataCOSC 325WAdam Drozdek4/1/2014Windows XPMicrosoft Corp. first released Windows XP on August 24, 2001. Windows XP was Microsoft's operating system that succeeded Windows 2000. Microsoft Corp. made Windows XP officially available to the public market on October 25, 2001. In "Windows XP Taking the PC to New Heights", by Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Bill Gates claimed that Windows XP was the best operating system ever built by Microsoft. Windows XP was developed based on all the advances acquired during 15 years of research (Waggener Edstrom Worldwide). Windows XP was Microsoft's first operating system tailored to both home users and business needs. Windows XP has implemented more developed, efficient and fast algorithms, which provide users with a much better PC experience than previous operating systems. This article will discuss these powerful algorithms and techniques implemented by Windows XP in more detail. Windows XP is based on the Windows NT system architecture. Windows NT is an operating system architecture that creates preemptive, 32-bit operating systems capable of running on multiple hardware and platforms, etc. The Windows NT architecture uses a system called the kernel, which connects program and application processes to the processor. The kernel is a set of functions that execute the basic mechanism of the operating system. The kernel is included in the operating system package as Ntoskrnl.exe. Mainly, the kernel code is built on C language as well as assembly language for some special instructions that require fast access to registers (Russinovich 65). Operating system processes, such as synchronization and thread scheduling, are primarily managed by the kernel in Windows XP....... middle of paper ......d when there is: completed I/O operations, execution events, or semaphores, wait for a foreground thread to terminate and thread starvation (Russinovich 348-9). All these processes cause an interruption in the processing of a thread's stream. So, by increasing the priority level of the interrupted thread, it may be possible to process it immediately after the interrupt is handled. To optimize CPU usage, Windows XP always keeps the CPU busy. When there are no executable threads, Windows XP will start processing idle threads. Idle threads have no priority level. So they will always be reserved and ready to execute if and only if all executable threads are processed. Page FaultsDisk DriversFile Systemshttp://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2001/aug01/08-24winxprtmpr.aspxhttp://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/history#T1=era6