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TechKnowSurge Catalog Videos OS Functions: Application and Process Management
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OS Functions: Application and Process Management

The operating system acts as the critical intermediary between applications and hardware, managing every running process to ensure system resources are allocated efficiently. Without it, each application would require direct hardware programming, creating inconsistent user experiences and making multitasking virtually impossible.

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About this video

The operating system functions as the indispensable intermediary between software applications and computer hardware, providing a standardized interface that allows applications to run without needing to manage hardware directly. This abstraction layer is fundamental to how modern computing works — without it, developers would be forced to write enormously complex, hardware-specific code for every application, dramatically increasing development effort while producing software that can only run on a single, predetermined configuration. Beyond simplifying development, the operating system solves the practical challenge of running many applications at the same time. It does this through process management, which involves converting each running application into a discrete process, assigning that process a priority level, and scheduling CPU time accordingly. Higher-priority processes receive hardware resources first, while lower-priority background processes are queued until capacity becomes available, keeping the system responsive without requiring any manual coordination from the user. This process management activity is observable in real time through tools like Windows Task Manager, which displays every active process on the system — including foreground applications, background services, and the multiple sub-processes that a single application such as a web browser may spawn when handling separate tabs or network requests. Understanding how the OS tracks and manages these processes is foundational knowledge for IT professionals working in system administration, performance troubleshooting, and cybersecurity.

What you'll learn

What's covered

OS Managing Applications

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+
3.1 Explain the purpose of operating systems.
3.2 Compare and contrast components of an operating system.
CompTIA A+ Core 2
1.8 Explain common OS types and their purposes.
1.3 Given a scenario, use features and tools of the Microsoft Windows 10/11 operating system (OS).
Cisco CCST IT
4.1 Assist users in resolving Windows OS issues
2.2 Assist end users in using tools to locate information about their device

Key terms

Operating System
OS
System software that manages hardware resources, provides common services for application software, and acts as an intermediary between users and computer hardware. Examples include Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Process Management
The operating system function that prioritizes and schedules processes from applications to be executed by the CPU.
Process
An instance of a program being executed by the operating system, assigned resources and managed alongside other running processes.
Task Manager
A Windows utility (accessed via Ctrl+Shift+Esc) that displays running processes, application status, CPU and memory usage, and allows users to end unresponsive programs.
Background Process
A task running on a computer that operates without direct user interaction, managed by the operating system alongside active applications.

Topics

Operating Systems Process Management Windows Task Manager Application Management Resource Allocation Os Fundamentals

Transcript

The Operating System's Role

Your operating system plays a critical role in managing applications. It's the go-between between the application and the rest of the hardware. Not to mention, you have lots of applications that are running at any given time, and it manages all of those different applications that you have open, or that are running in the background.

If we didn't have an operating system, what would happen is that the app would have to be programmed to run on the computer directly. This would cause a lot of problems, one of which is that we just have to do a lot of programming on this app and make this big huge program just to be functional, just for us to run it. Another problem is that the user experience for every single app that they would run would be very different — it would be whatever the programmers programmed for that app, and that could be really problematic from a learning perspective. There are lots of other problems with this as well, like how would we run multiple apps in this scenario. So it just creates a lot of different problems if we didn't have an operating system that would manage these apps, or be the interface between the app and the hardware.

Usually you have lots of apps running at any given time, and so what manages all of that? The operating system plays a role in making sure that the more important apps get their time and attention, and the less important apps are put on kind of the back burner until there is time that opens up on the hardware so it can process it. So it does this kind of management of all of the applications that are open.

Process Management

One of the ways that it manages it is through process management. Every application is just a file or program that's running, that's being executed, and so it then creates this process. The process then gets prioritized with all of the other processes that are running on the machine, and then when a request comes in to run part of this process, it will be sent through the CPU so it can run it, and then whatever the output is, wherever it's going, that will happen. So we manage these different processes, and that's one way that we manage the applications on a machine.

Seeing Processes in Task Manager

If you wanted to see what these processes look like, what you could do is click the start menu on your computer, type in task manager, and hit enter. When this pops up here, we can see all of the tasks that are open here on the left hand side.

I'm going to open up Chrome, and when that's open you can see that it opened up another app on here, and then we have a lot of different background processes that are happening as well. In fact, let me open up this tab here — we can see the different Chrome processes that are happening. Maybe I'm going to go to google.com, and then I open up another tab and maybe I'm going to go to the Microsoft site and hit enter, and so we'll go to there.

So you can see these different processes that are opening up to facilitate these different tabs and the different sites that we're going to. So these are the processes that are happening.

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