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Operating System: Windows XP

1. What do you mean by an operating system? What are its objectives?

Ans.: An operating system (OS) is a collection of system programs that together controls the operation of a computer system. The OS along with hardware, application and other system software, and users constitute a computer system. It is the most important part of any computer system. It acts as an intermediary between a user and the computer hardware. The OS has the following two objectives:

  1. Managing hardware: The OS manages and controls various hardware resources of a computer system. These hardware resources include processor, memory, disk space, I/O devices, etc. The OS supervises which input device's data are requesting for being processed ...

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