James Sweet writes:

How about offering some insight rather than just a big buzzer?

Sixteen-bit versions of Windows never did preemptive multitasking.
Thirty-two bit versions did and do, for 32-bit applications (but not
for 16-bit applications). Windows NT does it for all applications,
although a single MS-DOS virtual machine counts as one application (so
multiple 16-bit apps running inside it are not preemptively tasked
among themselves, for compatibility).

Depends on the version really, Win 3.1 and earlier didn't offer
pre-emptive multitasking, when an application was minimized it generally
ground to a halt.

It would not grind to a halt if the current application relinquished
control properly and frequently. However, all applications in the
system had to be well behaved in this way, or things would stall.

Win 9x was a big improvement over this but still mediocre.

It only did it for 32-bit applications, and overall Windows 9x was
very poorly written.

Win NT/2K/XP is better still, and are generally quite good
OS's, but the multitasking is still rather poor compared to several
other OS's on the market.

Not true. Multitasking on all the NT-based versions of Windows is
excellent. On those rare occasions when one application stalls
another on an NT-based OS, it's not because of any defect in
multitasking, it's because of interprocess signalling that stalls
applications by (potentially poor) design. For example, the Windows
Explorer is a potential source of multiple-application stalls,
although the latest versions of Windows Explorer are far better
behaved than the original (which was lifted from Windows 95, and was
thus very poorly written).

Of course, systems such as UNIX have been successfully multitasking
since the beginning, given that they were originally timesharing
systems by design.

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