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Individual Report Project Three Student Name: Andrew Frost Assessment Item No.: 3 Assessment Title: Report on the project tasks in the required areas for 120CT.
Note: your report should be supported with appropriate references using Coventry University Harvard Reference Style.

SID: 4959467

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Main differences between the Windows and Linux operating system : Task 1

Report including supporting examples: The first main different with Windows and Linux is the fact that Linux is an open source operating system. Linux was originally created to be a free operating system to run on Intel -x86 based computers. However as the operating system is open source anyone can modify and distribute the software. This means that where as there are few versions of Windows but there is a huge range of different versions of Linux with different features and that run on different pieces of hardware. Another large difference is the fact that Windows is mainly used with the GUI. It has been designed to be fairly user friendly with new users, meaning it has a fairly pleasing and easy to use GUI. Most versions of Linux do have a GUI but unlike windows it is much easier to use the terminal interface to perform actions. If you know some basic commands it is much quicker to edit and move files using the terminal instead of the GUI. There are many variants of the GUI for Linux depending which version you download but some variants are the GNOME desktop, Xfce and the Cinnamon desktop. For the MSDOS commands I used cd Desktop, mkdir TestTest and ipconfig. Here you can see that I used the command 'cd Desktop' to change the current directory I was in to the desktop. The next command I used was 'mkdir TestTest', this will make a folder called TestTest in the present working directory, in this case desktop. Finally I used 'ipconfig'. This displays information on your network including your local IP.

In the screenshot below you can see the commands I used in linux. I used cd, touch and ls. The first command was 'cd Desktop'. This works the same as the MSDOS command and moves the present working directory to the Desktop. The next command was 'touch testFile.txt'. This command makes a file called testFile with an extenstion of .txt (text file) and saves it in the pwd (in this case Desktop). This file can be seen at the bottom. The final command was 'ls'. This lists all files and folders in the current working directory.

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Memory hierarchy found in computer systems : Task 2

Report: At the lowest level of the Memory hierarchy is the registry memory which is controlled directly by the CPU. This holds individual values that are being worked on. Next is the cache RAM. This is usually in multiple levels, generally 3. This RAM is on the processor itself so has extremely low latency, this is where copies of data the program is currently using is stored until they are needed and move further down. Next comes the Random Access Memory. This is a lot larger than the caches (usually at least a couple of gigabytes). RAM is extremely fast to access and so a lot of data that is only temporary is stored here as when the computer is switched off RAM will lose all of the data it stores. Finally there is the Hard Disk. The Hard Disk is persistent memory which is where most data is saved as it is not lost when turned off. This hierarchy means that as long as the data which needs to be accessed is stored in the RAM or caches it can be access and processed very quickly. However the hard drive is slow in comparison so if data is being access from there it can severely slow down the times to perform a task.

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First-in-first-out (FIFO) approach to memory management : Task 3

Results with supporting examples: First in First Out approach to memory management means that all tasks that need to be performed are stored and put in a queue in a first come first serve fashion. The process works on the first task and nothing else until it completes the first task where it moves on to the second task. This means that a long process can hold up the queue for a long time, meaning small short tasks which could be important have to wait a long time to be processed. For example: A command to perform a perform an complicated calculation takes slot one in the queue. A command to perform a task the user just performed takes slot two. The processor takes 10 ticks to perform the calculation After 5 ticks the processor then works on what the user did. This causes the user to wait a long time before their command is performed.

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