JAY

1)       

Computers today are one of the important things we are using. They have helped a lot in compiling a lot data which used to be in hard records. One of the uses or benefits of computers is that they are able to provide and retrieve information so quickly so they have increased the pace of our work. The increase in the speed of work has helped us to do many things with less resources like in past a lot of manpower was used for record keeping and files and other things were made to keep the records saved. This is one use of computers in our lives other than that computers has helped us to work with machines which have the ability to produce the best quality of products with maximum speed and efficiency. In today's world it is necessary that to cater for such a heavy population things are made at the higher pace with best quality, so it is possible with the help of computer that we are able to cater for the need of quantity and quality of products required in daily life.

Computer is also helping us in education of children, it has enabled us to get the information form one part of the world to the other at a very rapid pace. So in summary computer today is in every walk of life, and is helping us a lot in developing at a fast pace.

2)       

Computers allow students to access more information more easily and the introduction of the internet means that this information is available to hand 24/7. Whether this is a good prospect or not is something that is debated frequently. For every factual and accurate piece of information that can be found on the internet, there are ten false ones. This has lead to a demand for school based websites and computer software that students can use without the risk of being fed false information. Computers allow students to collect this data quickly and efficiently and learn skills such as finding relevant information and producing it in a way that can be read by others. As most students will have computer facilities at home, teachers can set them homework projects that wouldn't have been possible with just the facilities available in library books. The internet and computer software programmes can also be used by students to carry out tests for revision purposes.

They provide an easy access to vast stores of information and knowledge, which would require us normally to sift through enormous volumes of libraries and simply compact it for us at our finger tips. Some benefits may be enumerated as follows:-

1) For research purposes and to collect secondary data.
2) for tabulating and organizing data.
3) For using various design applications.
4) For documenting and writing reports on office applications.
5) for analyzing data and developing graphical representations.
6) For connecting with people on different forums and newsgroups in order to share experiences and gather data.

3)       

An operating system (OS) is a set of computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. At the foundation of all system software, the OS performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking, and managing files. It also may provide a graphical user interface for higher level functions. Various services performed by operating systems are discussed below.

Process management: It deals with running multiple processes. Most operating system allow a process to be assigned a priority which affects its allocation of CPU time. Interactive operating systems also employ some level of feedback in which the task with which the user is working receives higher priority. In many systems there is a background process which runs when no other process is waiting for the CPU.

Memory management: The memory manager in an OS coordinates the memories by tracking which one is available, which is to be allocated or deallocated and how to swap between the main memory and secondary memories. The operating system tracks all memory used by each process so that when a process terminates, all memory used by that process will be available for other processes.

Disk and file systems: Operating systems have a variety of native file systems that controls the creation, deletion, and access of files of data and programs.

Networking: Most current operating systems are capable of using the TCP/IP networking protocols. This means that one system can appear on a network of the other and share resources such as files, printers, and scanners. Many operating systems also support one or more vendor-specific legacy networking protocols as well.

Security: most operating systems include some level of security.

Device drivers: A device driver is a specific type of computer software developed to allow interaction with hardware devices. Typically this constitutes an interface for communicating with the device, through the specific computer bus or communications subsystem that the hardware is connected to, providing commands to and/or receiving data from the device, and on the other end, the requisite interfaces to the operating system and software applications.

Examples of operating systems:BS2000,BS3000,DOS,PC-DOS,MS-DOS,LINUX,SOLARIS,MAC OS,UNIX,WINDOWS

4)       

Application that I fully utilize is Microsoft excel by Microsoft.

1. Times consuming problem resolved

It is one of the most popular pros that Excel provide Tasks can be completed more quickly.Excel has so many tools that can be utilized to finish these activities faster: computations, accounting tasks, data analysis, and many more. Wanting to find out how to learn Excel, therefore, is something you should seriously consider. If you learn MS Excel, the number of hours you usually complete reports will really decrease significantly.

2. Import, organize, and explore massive data sets within significantly expanded spreadsheets.

Work with massive amounts of data in Office Excel, which supports spreadsheets that can be up to 1 million rows by 16,000 columns. In addition to the bigger grid, Office Excel supports multicore processor platforms for faster calculation of formula-intense spreadsheets.

5)       

An external storage device is devices provides additional storage other than that available in computer. Data can be transported easily from one place to another.

Extra space

Of course, the function of an external hard drive is to provide some much-needed extra storage space. If your memory is used up or about to get saturated and replacing your current hard drive is out of the question, getting an external hard drive is a wise decision. You will have more space with which to store additional data in text, images or audio form. You could also use the extra room to transfer files to unload your computer and boost its performance.

Storage for old files

If you have files that have been sitting on your computer for months (or years) but you still cannot get around to deleting, you might find an external hard drive very useful. Many of us are wary about removing old files from our computers, believing that they will come in handy someday. The problem here is that it tends to clog up the system and eat up resources. With an external hard drive, old files may be transferred and memory freed up to increase speed and improve performance of the computer.

Backup important data

Many computer users fail to back up their data. This can be a problem, particularly when important files are involved. If there is no available space on your computer or you simply want to stash important data someplace else, then use an external hard drive to store extra copies of your files.

Security

Some external hard drives allow encryption, so once files are transferred, they as good as hieroglyphics to anyone who wishes to access them without permission. For heavy internet users, it is also possible to keep files secure by transferring them to another storage device for safekeeping. Once data has been saved, simply turn off the external hard drive and detach it. Even if it remains attached to your computer, no hacker will be able to access your files from anywhere.

Convenient and handy

External hard drives are smaller, lighter and more portable than a laptop, so these can be detached, carried around, placed in a bag or purse and stored without requiring a lot of space. These are handy enough to be brought anywhere, allowing you to access your files from another computer unit.

6)       

An embedded computer is Computer system that is part of a larger system and performs only peripheral functions (such as guidance or security) but no data processing function.

An example of embedded system device is smart phone.With the rapid development of 3G wireless communication technologies, higher requirements are demanded on the performance of mobile communication terminals. The mobile phone merely used, as a voice communication device can no longer meet  users´ needs. It should be an inevitable trend to develop a smart phone that integrates wireless communication technologies and palm PC functions. The operating system or the core of software, however, can directly affect the overall performance of the smart phone. Below are the function of smart phone which is monitored by embedded system that navigate each functions

The smart phone has the following features:
    (1) Restriction and Application

    The smart phone has limited power supply because it is chiefly energized by the storage battery with a limited capacity. Therefore, the operating system shall provide excellent power management capability to ensure normal running as long as possible.

    (2) High Reliability

    Reliability is an issue to be considered by all smart phones. A good operating system shall be instrumental in developing stable and reliable application programs although its kernel and privileged code occupy less space.

    (3) Support of Real-time Multi-task Processing and Various Communication Protocols

    The wireless access mode requires the SPOS to support real-time multi-task processing and various communication protocols. Moreover, in order to help users make smooth conversion and support the standards to be launched, the SPOS shall abstract the network protocol stack. In addition, it shall ensure the consistency of Application Programming Interfaces (API) irrespective of the specific protocol stack being adopted.

    (4) Environment Self-adaptiveness

    It is an important research direction for the SPOS to ensure a QoS-based system interaction under a dynamic and mobile environment. The system self-adaptiveness is an eclectic strategy and completely transparent to the applications. Environment self-adaptiveness can ensure compatibility with the existing applications. Therefore, the particular mobile environment for application purposes has a little importance development.

    (5) Open Platform

    The SPOS shall be open to the third party users and provide a powerful programming environment for developers of handset application software to conduct related development via the application program framework in a convenient and fast manner.

7)       

BIOS is an acronym for Basic Input/Output System. It is the boot firmware program on a PC, and controls the computer from the time you start it up until the operating system takes over. When you turn on a PC, the BIOS first conducts a basic hardware check, called a Power-On Self Test (POST), to determine whether all of the attachments are present and working. Then it loads the operating system into your computer's random access memory, or RAM.The BIOS also manages data flow between the computer's operating system and attached devices such as the hard disk, video card, keyboard, mouse, and printer.The BIOS stores the date, the time, and your system configuration information in a battery-powered, non-volatile memory chip, called a CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) after its manufacturing process.

ROM is an acronym for Read-Only Memory. It refers to computer memory chips containing permanent or semi-permanent data. Unlike RAM, ROM is non-volatile; even after you turn off your computer, the contents of ROM will remain.Almost every computer comes with a small amount of ROM containing the boot firmware. This consists of a few kilobytes of code that tell the computer what to do when it starts up, e.g., running hardware diagnostics and loading the operating system into RAM. On a PC, the boot firmware is called the BIOS.Originally, ROM was actually read-only. To update the programs in ROM, you had to remove and physically replace your ROM chips. Contemporary versions of ROM allow some limited rewriting, so you can usually upgrade firmware such as the BIOS by using installation software. Rewritable ROM chips include PROMs (programmable read-only memory), EPROMs (erasable read-only memory), EEPROMs (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory), and a common variation of EEPROMs called flash memory.

When the PC was first introduced, the BIOS software containing all the device drivers for the entire system was collectively burned into one or more nonvolatile (meaning they retain their data even when the power is turned off) read-only memory (ROM) chips and placed on the motherboard. In essence, the drivers were self-contained, preloaded into memory, and accessible anytime the PC was powered on.
This ROM chip also contained a power on self test (POST) program and a bootstrap loader. The bootstrap program was designed to initiate the loading of an OS by checking for and loading the boot sector from a floppy disk and, if one was not present, a hard disk. After the OS was loaded, it could call on the low-level routines (device drivers) in the BIOS to interact with the system hardware. In the early days, all the necessary device drivers were in the BIOS stored in the motherboard ROM.
When the OS loaded, you didn't have to load a driver to interact with those pieces of hardware because the drivers were already preloaded in the ROM. That worked great as long as you didn't add any new hardware for which there wasn't a driver in ROM. If you did, you then had two choices: (1) adapter card BIOS, and (2) device drivers loaded from disk.At this point, the BIOS had grown from being entirely contained in the motherboard ROM, to having additional drivers linked in from adapter card ROMs, to having even more drivers linked in after being loaded into RAM during the early stages of the boot process

8)       

A multi tasking operating systems is:

An operating system that gives you the perception of 2 or more tasks/jobs/processes running at the same time. It does this by dividing system resources amongst these tasks/jobs/processes.It switches between the tasks/jobs/processes while they are executing very fast over and over again.

There are two basic types of multitasking: preemptive and cooperative. In preemptive multitasking, the operating system parcels out CPU time slices to each program. In cooperative multitasking, each program can control the CPU for as long as it needs it. If a program is not using the CPU, however, it can allow another program to use it temporarily. OS/2, Windows 95, Windows NT, the Amiga operating system and UNIX use preemptive multitasking, whereas Microsoft Windows 3.x and the MultiFinder (for Macintosh computers) use cooperative multitasking.

Examples are ATM machine, or movie theater stub ticket system.

9)       

A device driver is a program that controls a particular type of device that is attached to your computer. There are device drivers for printers, displays, CD-ROM readers, diskette drives, and so on. When you buy an operating system, many device drivers are built into the product. However, if you later buy a new type of device that the operating system didn't anticipate, you'll have to install the new device driver. A device driver essentially converts the more general input/output instructions of the operating system to messages that the device type can understand. Some Windows programs are virtual device drivers. These programs interface with the Windows Virtual Machine Manager. There is a virtual device driver for each main hardware device in the system, including the hard disk drive controller, keyboard, and serial and parallel ports. They're used to maintain the status of a hardware device that has changeable settings. Virtual device drivers handle software interrupts from the system rather than hardware interrupts. In Windows operating systems, a device driver file usually has a file name suffix of DLL or EXE. A virtual device driver usually has the suffix of VXD.

Examples of device drivers are mouse driver, keyboard driver, video card driver, sound card driver, and anything that is connected to your computer has a driver.

10)   

System utilities are the core software functions that allow you to manage your computer in ways that you would find it inconceivable to be without. System utilities may be already included in your computer or downloaded from the Internet. No matter where you look, you can always find plenty of system utility programs at little or no cost. In this article, we will go over several examples of system utility programs and how they effect you and your computer.Examples of system utilities are Disk Defragmenter, Disk Cleanup, System Restore and Registry Cleaners,

Most widely system utilities used is registry cleaners.Registry cleaners are programs that allow for you to scan your computer for any errors in the registry, which is a collection of the core computer files that are essential to performance and functionality, and repairs them if needed. Registry cleaners are widely available on the Internet and give you a significant upperhand when cleaning up the mess that a virus or other malware has left on your computer. Likewise, some otherwise safe programs can cause errors in the registry without intending to. Registry files can also be corrupted if the user unknowingly deletes or modifies a file in the registry. This usually occurs when an inexperienced user tries to fix their computer and inevitably causes more damage than before.