1. Virtual Memory

When you double-click a program containing a sequence of instructions, a process is created. The Windows operating system provides each new process created with its own private memory address space (called the process memory). The process memory is a part of virtual memory; virtual memory is not real memory, but an illusion created by the operating system's memory manager. It is because of this illusion that each process thinks that it has its own private memory space. During runtime, the Windows memory manager, with the help of hardware, translates the virtual address into the physical address (in RAM) where the actual data resides; to manage the memory, it pages some of the memory to the disk. When the process's thread accesses the virtual address that is paged to the disk, the memory manager loads it from the disk back to the memory. The following...