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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)
AMD 253.32-2.4%12:24 PM EST
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To: Neil Booth who wrote (48932)7/25/2001 11:22:58 AM
From: Milan ShahRead Replies (2) of 275872
 
Uhhh, both Win9x and NT are preemptive.

I believe you are wrong here. Win9x multitasks by expecting each app to be "well behaved" and yeild control back to the OS, so the OS can context switch. It is possible in Win9x for a single app to freeze the entire machine. Indeed, this is the source of the perception that NT is so much smoother at multi-tasking - if an app is "stuck" for a few seconds doing something like a synchronous network call, you can switch to another app while its waiting, whereas in Win9x, it would appear to freeze the machine for a few seconds.

There is an element of pre-emptive multi-tasking in Win9x - if you start several DOS windows, each runs in its own virtual x86 environment, and each is pre-emptively multitasked.

Of course, this stuff is now legend, so almost all commercial apps generally do a good job of yeilding back to the OS, so NT's advantage is somewhat nullified. But if you think of all the places where the programmer assumes a function call will return right away, but instead in some configurations (slow or busy networks being the most common source) it doesn't, you'll still find many spots in an app that will appear to freeze a Win9x machine.

Milan
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