Comparison of Operating Systems - Essay Example

The main difference between UNIX and Windows is that UNIX code is open source it is less standardized, and selecting a UNIX server depends on each organization's needs. But Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, is not an operating system you can modify easily, it is designed to work in a particular way with a certain user interface as designated by Microsoft software engineers.
UNIX is a multi-user, multitasking operating system. It has some 20 years of history and is very established in terms of performance, reliability, scalability, and security. UNIX has undergone thirty years of continuous research and development with contributions from quite several volunteers, which resulted in an operating system that has powerful multiprocessing capabilities and whose performance is still unmatched. It not only meets the demands of today's computing needs but in many cases exceeds them.
Microsoft's Windows NT server is well known this also is a multi-user and multitasking operating system. It is much younger compared to UNIX, but the Windows operating system is well-established in the PC market and users are reasonably comfortable with it. The PC market is huge and it is well-known that products that are friendly to the user alone can win the market. Windows NT server is way ahead in this area.
UNIX is portable to numerous hardware platforms, you can use it from small networks to supercomputers. UNIX has administrative functions that can make server and user management very easy. UNIX's strong preemptive multitasking and protected memory support make it well-designed as an application server. Windows NT applications are multithreaded and have multi-platform support. Its graphic user interface is well known, it is very user-friendly even a user without much knowledge of computers can start using the system using Windows NT on the PC. Windows supports almost all the application software but performs better if its Microsoft based application software.
The scripting technology used in both operating systems is different in terms of their complexity. Microsoft's server scripting technologies like VBScript and ASP are becoming more popular because it is easy to develop web applications with them. On the other hand, writing an application with a Shell script or Perl in a UNIX environment needs a lot of programming experience. These programs are complicated to learn.
In UNIX an authorized user can run any application on his machine once when he logs in. But in the case of an NT user, it is possible to run only those applications which are written as client/server applications. The NT server cannot run any application which resides on the server. In the case of ASP, written applications adopt three layers or three-tier architecture.
UNIX operating systems come with a program called Sendmail. There are other Mail Transport Agents (MTA) available for UNIX like Exim and qmail, but Sendmail is the most widely used. Exim, qmail, sendmail are free for use even in a commercial environment. For Windows NT you will have to buy a separate software package to set up an e-mail server. Most of the NT-based companies use Microsoft Exchange Server as their MTA. This is an expensive solution that is less successful in a commercial environment.
Disk space usage in UNIX can be prohibited or controlled by every user logged on to the UNIX server by using its disk space allocation utility. Microsoft claims this facility will be available in its future release version 5.0 with improved storage management (Alexander, 2006).
UNIX systems are more stable in handling high server loads better than Windows, UNIX machines rarely require reboots while Windows constantly needs them. Servers running on UNIX enjoy extremely high up-time and high availability/reliability. Websites designed and programmed to be served under a UNIX-based web server can easily be hosted on a Windows server, whereas the reverse is not always possible. Server hosting websites like Windows and other related applications like SQL Server each cost a significant amount of money; on the other hand, UNIX is a free operating system to download, install and operate whereas Windows hosting results in a more expensive platform (Boston Computing Network, 2006).