Multi-tasking

Get the most from your computer. Many of the tasks you do in your daily routine involve multiple tools. The advent of software that allowed multi-tasking, allowed multiple programs to be running at the same time. Even when the number of programs exceed the available semiconductor memory, modern software will swap tasks in and out of "virtual memory". Virtual memory is memory the system sets aside for task swapping and teporary data storage. The penalty for not having enough "real semiconductor memory" is that the virtual memory operations, (read/writes to disk) are slower.

What this means is that you do not have to save and exit from your text editor to send E-mail, or any other task that you may want to access quickly. All the modern windows programs have made it quick and efficient to switch between programs. This has been done with the use of the task bar or with the <alt>  Tab key

By repeatedly hitting the TAB key while holding down Alt, the focus ( next task to run) shifts to the right on each stroke. Releasing the Alt key switches to the task at hand.