Hardware and Operating Systems – INFT130

Winter 2009

Assignment #4

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*** Due Monday, March 26 ***

Objectives:

- To reinforce your knowledge gained from the class lectures and various exercises.

- To continue building critical thinking to help with diagnosis and troubleshooting of problems.

Deliverables: a document that answers the following questions.

1. You are about to set up a new disk. You have a choice to use either a FAT file system or NTFS file system. Which file system is generally better and why? {20 points}.
2. If you had a choice to operate a CPU in Real mode or Protected mode, which one do you think would allow your system to keep running even if some problems occurred on a particular program? Why might this be so? {20 points}
3. What is the purpose of an IRQ? {20 points}
4. List 3 well known operating systems {10 points}
5. Critical thinking question: whenever you set up a computer, should you always use the latest operating system? What are some of the factors that you must weigh in order to decide if an operating system will work well on a computer? {25 points}
6. You have a computer that has 256MB of memory. You install a second RAM chip that also has 256MB on it. When you reboot the computer, it still only shows that the capacity is 256MB. List all the possible reasons for this {1 point for each reason – maximum of 5 points}