Meaning – The term process, refers to the course of events that occurs during the execution of all or part of a program. This can be anything from a small background task, such as a spell-checker or system events handler to a full-blown application like Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word.
Since most operating systems have many background tasks running, your computer is likely to have many more processes running than actual programs.
The term “process” can also be used as a verb, which means to perform a series of operations on a set of data.
In general, process refers to a set of predetermined rules in place that must be followed.
Example of usage – “You may only have three programs running, but there may be twenty active processes. You can view active processes in Windows by opening the Task Manager (press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and click Task Manager). On a Mac, you can see active processes by opening Activity Monitor (in the Applications?Utilities folder).”
