ADVANCEMENT IN COMPUTER HARDWARE & SOFTWARE

Computer Hardware

During the past decades computer hardwares were very bulky.  Thanks to technological advancement, today we do not experience issues in the past.  Examples of technologically advanced hardware are rear projection screen and projection film.

Today it is less likely for us to experience those awful issues.  Computers today are available in different sizes and shapes.  If you are planning to purchase  one, you can easily get confused because of the available options for you.  So before deciding to purchase certain computer hardware, you have to take into consideration number of things like its configuration.

It is also astonishing to think about the rate of computer hardware innovation these days.  Almost every week companies introduce new hardware to the public.  One positive thing about computer hardware advancement is that the price and size of the hardware is greatly reduced, while its function and efficiency is dramatically increased.  Today it would be a great investment if you buy the latest model of certain computer hardware.  Computer hardware that are constantly changing or developing are motherboards, RAMs, hard disks, video cards, monitors and even peripheral hardware such as mouse and keyboards are rapidly improving.

Flash memory cards and hard disks today are rapidly increasing their storage capacity. There are also flash drives that have the ability to transfer data to and from the computer at a faster rate.  Animations, games and other applications are now very demanding, and that is the reason why today RAMs are increased.  This is simply to allow smooth functioning of the computer.  Motherboards have also undergone dramatic changes during the past years.  Even though there have been a lot of changes with these computer hardware, their prices are still inexpensive.

The most important element of a computer is the processor.  This specific computer hardware determines the overall performance of a computer.  That is why, major companies such as Intel and AMD, who are manufacturing this hardware are on a tight race in developing new and advanced processor to attract more customers.

As said earlier, the mouse and keyboard are two of the peripheral computer hardware that are rapidly developing or evolving.  Today, you can easily find a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard. Wireless computer hardware offers a lot of advantages to its users. First, users will have the freedom to move around while using the computer; they need not to be that close to the computer monitor.

Today you can also find computers that would perfectly fit in your palm.  Even if its size is small, its capacity is huge and its performance is brilliant.

Computer’s software

In order of the advancement of harwares, the companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc providing softwares(operating systems) are also improving their OS features to enhance the performance and usability of computers and mobile devices.

  Advancement in computer operating system it turned out to be very easy to maintain specific standards in the computer industry. These standards consisted hardware interfaces, video memory standards, sound standards and CPU memory specifications. Yet, there was still a lot of conflict within the industry, and lots of hardware turned out to be unsatisfactory. Consequently, numerous games developed in Windows faced a lot of problems. Microsoft understood this problem early on and emphasized its efforts on improving its environment and working to improve performance for the parts of the operating system that cater to game and multimedia requirements. These efforts were obvious in Windows 95, one of the first operating systems that produced reliable hardware-software interaction a reality. Since all hardware companies had to meet a comparable standard and Microsoft controlled how its operating system responded to the hardware. In the DOS days, you had to build your own drivers for every type of video card, but with Windows you had to develop to only one standard. In spite of spending time producing and understanding numerous hardware specifications, designers relied on Microsoft to do all that for them and wrap up it for their use in the OS as windows 7. However still windows 7 has some lacking registry problems, booting problems, time sharing, etc which might not be in windows 8.

Mac (Apple) is again one of the Popular OS and has good features such as Mac OS X loves RAM. Short of buying a new Mac or a processor upgrade, adding RAM is the best way to improve Mac OS X performance. Install the maximum amount of RAM that your Mac will accept and your budget will allow. But Mac has also some deficiency like It's quite hard to identify the most common Mac problems, because most problems aren't all that common. They can range from minor annoyances that we'll all see once in a while, like applications slowing down or files behaving oddly, to the almost mythical calamities that many users will never encounter, like disk failures and kernel panics.  However Apple might resolve these problems in upcoming OS like X mountain Lion.

Advancements in Computer Disk Imaging Software

Disk imaging software has come a long way from the days we would make a system disk snapshot or a complete system backup for that ever impending disaster. Sometimes we would thank our stars and sometime wonder why we did it, since we never got to utilize it. Take it from someone who has lost entire systems at an alarmingly regular rate of intervals, backing up your data is never a bad bet. The only time that uncertainty looms like dark clouds, is when technology changes, and we have to take backups all over again. In recent years, the software industry has made leaps and bounds in backup software, with features that will make you sit up and smile. Features like operating independent restore, capability of backup software to repair your damaged OS and if not the ability to restore to an alternate without any hassles. The modern-day disk imaging software will boot independently of the OS and scan to see if there is anything to do to repair a bad operating system, and if not offer alternates in a system restore. The software will analyze alternates and show you a brief or expanded summary if necessary along with the exact steps to take to a complete system restore in the shortest time possible. 

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FUNDAMENTALS OF OS

DEFINITION: 

       "An operating system is a set of system software programs in a computer that regulate the ways application software programs use the computer hardware and ways that user control the computer."

 The operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware. Operating systems can be found on almost any device that contains a computer—from cellular phones and video game consoles to supercomputers and web servers.

       Cellular OS is the operating system that operates a smartphone, tablet, PDA, or other digital mobile devices. Modern mobile operating systems combine the features of a personal computer operating system with touchscreen, cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS mobile navigation, camera, video camera, voice recorder,music player, Near field communication, and other features.

ERA: 

Operating system was absent in the first commercial form of electronic computer launched in 1940's.The earliest version of operating system was used by the General Motors Research Laboratories. IBM 701 was the first operating system equipped computer architecture.This type of computer system was known as batch processing system. Through the 1950s, many major features were pioneered in the field of operating systems and after that many Os's were launched by IBM for mainframe computers. During 1970's according to need of companies and organizations many OS were introduced like General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS), DOS, Apple Macintosh computer with an innovative Graphical User Interface (GUI), Linux, etc.

However these days many advance OS are available such as.....OS x Mountain lion(Mac), Leopard, windows 8, windows 7, windows server 2012, Android 4.1, etc.

Common Features of OS: 

 Program Execution Providing Interfaces Handling Input / Output Operations Error Handling Memory management Process management.

• Now the reason behind the advancement is to manage critical resources in increasingly complex computer Architecture. The performance issues incurred by the increasingly complex structure and operations of these resources have not been effectively addressed at any level of computer systems.The overall performance of a computer system is increasingly hindered by data accesses to memory and storage.Thus, acquiring good performance more and more relies on fast data accesses by making efficient use of the resources on memory hierarchies. This dissertation advances operating systems and database systems to manage the shared resources to support fast data accesses for applications running on multi-core platforms.

Operating system types

·         1)     Single-user operating systems

·         a          a)     Graphical User Interface or GUIs

·         b          b)     Command Line Interface (CLI) operating systems

·         2)     Multi-user operating systems

·         3)     Multi-processor and multi-tasking operating systems

FUNCTION OF OS

Access Control

      When a computer is started, it runs in the supervisor mode, by which we mean that the first few programs running on the computer and the operating system have an unlimited access to the hardware. An operating system has the ability to place the computer in the protected mode, wherein programs are given a limited access to computer resources.

Execution of Programs

     Programs in execution are known as processes. The execution of a program requires the operating system to create processes. The operating system kernel creates a process by loading program code from the disk and allocating memory to it before running the program.

User Interface

     Users interact with operating systems by means of command line interfaces or graphical user interfaces. Though graphical user interface cannot be referred to as an operating system service, many operating systems integrate support for user interfaces into their kernels. Beginning from Windows 95, Microsoft Windows has kept revising its user interfaces. Their latest operating system, Windows Vista implements a graphics subsystem.

Memory Management

     The operating system kernel handles the allocation and management of memory that programs use. In a cooperative memory management strategy, it is assumed that programs make a voluntary use of the computer memory. This strategy was used by operating systems of old times. Modern operating systems implement segmentation and paging mechanisms facilitating memory protection, whereby all the computer programs can obtain a fair share of memory for execution. The operating system kernel controls the amount of memory allocated to application programs. An operating system can use the same memory locations for multiple tasks, using the underlying concept of virtual memory and swapping or paging.

Scheduling

     An operating system kernel consists of a scheduler program that manages the time taken by each program for its execution. Kernel passes the controls to processes whereby the processes can access the CPU and memory. In cooperative multitasking, each process is allowed to use the system resources for an unlimited period of time. Pre-emptive multitasking mechanisms have replaced cooperative multitasking. Windows NT was the first to implement pre-emptive multitasking. This feature reached the users after Windows XP was released.

Interrupt Handling

    An operating system has to deal with unexpected events in program execution. They are known as interrupts. Interrupts may also come from computer hardware. If a piece of computer hardware triggers an interrupt, the operating system kernel devises ways to handle it. Interrupts triggered by running programs can also be handled by the operating system kernel.

Management of Files

     Operating systems are in charge of handling the application program access to files stored on the disk. The operating systems in earlier days did not support different types of file systems. But the relatively recent operating systems, like Unix and Linux, implement a virtual file system allowing various types of programs, to access a wide variety of system resources and devices that use different file systems.

File systems 

     File systems are methods used for storing and managing computer files and data. A file system can be considered as a specialized storage system for the organization, access and retrieval of data. To get a glimpse of some file systems like FAT and NTFS, go through FAT and NTFS Data Recovery Information.

Computer Security

     I am sure you are aware of multiple user profiles on operating systems. When you login to your user account on the operating system you use, you are actually being a part of the security measures implemented by your operating system. Most of the operating systems require its users to login to their accounts by means of a username and password. Recent developments in technology have introduced biometry to operating systems. Windows Vista has introduced User account control, whereby each logon session is associated with a token containing the privilege assigned to that session.

Computer Networking

   Operating systems support a variety of networking protocols, whereby, computers running different operating systems can work over a common network. The operating system support for networking protocols enables the computers to access resources on remote computers in fairly simple ways.

POPULAR OPERATING SYSTEMS

For more info about windows OS