HI. I am a neophyte taking introductory level courses in operating systems theory. As part of my class, I am assigned a research paper regarding the following operating systems: windows xp home, linux, solaris and .Net. Our teacher told us to choose our own categories for comparing these systems and I am looking for some advice as to what some of the similarities and differences between these systems are. I would greatly appreciate your assistance in letting me know what some of the key issues in modern operating systems are and in themes to research for introductory technical level comparison between the systems. Thanks.

I think it's fair to say that if this is a homework assignment, your teacher rightly intends you to do your own work. But, obviously, part-and-parcel of doing any research is searching (e.g. on-line) for previously published material as your sources.

What your teacher has asked you to do with the material you find is, I think, both generous and reasonable. And so, I think that this is exactly what you should dive-in and do. Search on-line for comparative articles. Read them. You'll probably locate several hundred articles that were written with a similar objective to yours. Employ them, without copying verbatim, to create a view of your own making.

C'mon... if you don't do the work yourself, how can you learn anything? You're just wasting your own time. Dive in. The water's fine.

Actually Sundial, asking the UNIX and Windows communities is exactly where my professor told me to start. There are several issues at hand which I know about and am beginning to research: multithreading, multiprogramming, cost, security holes, availability and expense of support just to name a few. There is also the whole Open Source vs proprietary issue. For example Linus Torvalds beign sued for viewing proprietary code from SCO. However due to the shortened format of my class, my teacher suggested going to forums and asking for additional topics which may help. THis is a five week course and my teacher wanted us to ask the community to help us cut through the repetitive ads, etc. to get to the real meat what is affecting businesses today. This is in no way cheating. Thanks for your response, but it is unhelpful.

There are differences in:

- Process management
- Memory management
- Filesystem management and support
- number of supported platforms

... in everything. Unix is complete different architecture than Windows.

Try search at google for articles (comparison). But i think better way is to read something more deatiled about Unix architecture and then you could understand the differences between windows, unix and other platforms.

I appreciate your input and the suggestion to find a book about UNIX architecture is a good point. I am taking an introduction ot UNIX course at the same time as my theory course so I hope that will help. Also, taking it from an architectural point of view sounds like it will be important. I will mark the specific points you mentioned and look into the specific differences. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me.