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General discussion

Leopard multitasking

Mar 23, 2008 8:14AM PDT

I've always found Microsoft Windows never multitasked properly in the real world and would like to know whether Leopard has a better fundamental design.

For example, PCs sometimes freeze while downloading patches from the internet (especially Microsoft or anti-virus patches) or when there are intermittent/performance problems with the corporate LAN. In these cases the CPU and disk utilisation is next to zero, but still Windows fails to allow other applications to be run.

Furthermore, applications that have crashed (especially Internet Explorer) or are experiencing problems frequently cannot have their windows minimised and so prevent running applications being accessed or other applications being started. There's also the ridiculous situation that Task Manager doesn't easily allow you to find out the problem and what's causing the machine to grind to a halt.

It's as if the network device driver and application processes have higher priority than the OS task scheduler and display manager!

Is Leopard any better at multitasking and does the display manager have a higher priority than all application processes such that it can always minimise or move all windows on the screen?

Thanks.

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