What is the disadvantages of cooperative multitasking?

Homework getting you down? Well, here's a bit of an earful I got in an e-mail some years back from a programmer at I.B.M. that I had irritated more than a little bit by insisting that I wanted an AIX cluster to use cooperative multitasking:

"Everyone knows, of course, that pre-emptive multitasking is better. One thing a pre-emptive multitasker has which a cooperative multitasker doesn't is ALMOST COMPLETE control of the system. So if a task crashes, a pre-emptive multitasker will be able to remove the task from the system, while a cooperative multitasker can't. Are you a total idiot?"

Needless to say, if have kept that e-mail for almost ten years, now. LOL!

Uhh needless to say that most pre-emptive multitasking environments do crash!

I think my Win3xx systems are more stable than a lot of my Win9x systems (especialy on my IBM Thinkpad 770 ;-)!

No multitasking (like plain old DOS) is the best way to avoid a crash.

hey,
I would like to know about Windows 3.1 did not support true preemptive multitasking. Instead, the designers of Windows 3.1 provided something they called “cooperative multitasking”, in which each program is expected to give up control of the CPU at reasonable time intervals, so that the Windows dispatcher can provide execution time to another waiting program. What is the disadvantages of this method?

rgds,
jimmy