Figure 2.8 The Windows XP Task Manager showing

Operating System Fundamentals
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Peripherals
Peripheral devices are hardware devices that are connected to the computer by connection ports on the motherboard. Examples include the monitor, keyboard, mouse, webcam and printer. Peripheral devices are difficult to program and manage. Although many different applications need to use peripheral devices, the task of accessing them is simplified by the operating system. Applications do not directly access peripheral devices. These devices are programmed and controlled using device drivers provided by the operating system. When an application needs to use a device it talks to the device drivers. The device drivers then tell the device what to do. When anew device is installed, the operating system looks for builtin device drivers or adds new drivers to control the device. Most newer operating systems and devices are Plug and Play compatible, which means that the operating system will handle everything related to installing the new device and its drivers without any action from the user (other than confirming installation options. Well take a closer look at Input/Output management in Unit 5


File System
Your computer contains more than just your hardware resources. It also contains all of the information that you use and manipulate. This information is stored on your hard disk, CD/DVD discs, and removable storage devices. Your operating system controls the actual physical operation of these storage devices. It also helps you to manage the files stored on these devices. Different operating systems use different file systems to encode and organize your information. For example, older versions of Windows used either FAT16 or FAT32 (FAT stands for File Allocation Table. These older file systems limited the amount of information you could store on a hard disk, so newer versions of Windows (XP, Vista, and Windows 7) use NTFS (New Technology File System). NTFS lets you store up to 2 Terabytes TB) of information on a single volume and provides greater file security than the older FAT file systems. Other operating systems use different file systems such as EXT3 for Linux, or HFS+ for Mac OS X. Regardless of which file system an operating system uses, the operating system must perform certain key file management tasks for the user

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