What is background mode?A program in background mode has any feature?How to make a program run in background mode?Please explain to me.Thanks in advance.

LTheobald

Background mode is basically a program that is running, doing some tasks but you can't see it. This way you can go off and do something else while this program does its thing. For example, I believe Winamp has a background mode facility for it's Media Library. When the Media Library looks for files on your PC, it can run in the background. This allows you to use Winamp to do other things without distrubing the search process.

As for how to run a program in background mode, a program can only be run in background mode if it has that feature programmed into the product. This option is also normally pretty obvious like a big button when you hit certain processes. You can't take any program and have it run in some kind of background mode.

ScottGem

Back in the days of DOS, before multi-tasking OSes like Windows 95 and later, you could only run one program at a time. To get around this, programmer created what were then known as TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident). These were programs that could stay in memory even after another program was loaded. Utilities like anti-virus, print spoolers, file managers, and others fell into this TSR category.

Once OSes were able to multi-task, one could load multiple programs into memory and have them working simultaneously. Only one program would be the active program running in the foreground, all the others would then be running in the background. Anti-virus programs are still a prime example of this.

Therefore, making another program the active program would send the previously active program into the background.