Operating Systems
10 free questions with worked answers, and 320 more in the full bank.
Free questions
What is the primary purpose of Safe Mode in Windows?
1 mark · Easy
Which of the following is an example of an operating system?
1 mark · Easy
Which command is used to list files and directories in Linux?
1 mark · Easy
Which Linux command is used to record a user login session in a file?
1 mark · Easy
Which file system is commonly used on Windows operating system?
1 mark · Easy
What is the main function of an operating system?
1 mark · Easy
Which of the following is a Linux distribution?
1 mark · Easy
What should you do before upgrading the operating system on a user's computer?
3 marks · Medium
Which command would you use to restart a Windows computer from the Command Prompt?
3 marks · Medium
Which tool would you use to check for disk errors in Windows?
4 marks · Hard
More Operating Systems questions (page 4 of 6)
Answers and explanations are in the full bank.
- The ICT team wants every domain PC to lock after 10 minutes of inactivity and to block the Control Panel for students. Which tool applies such settings centrally? · 2 marks
- Why is a Windows Hello PIN considered safer than the account password, even though it may be shorter? · 3 marks
- An officer steps away from their desk for a few minutes. Which keyboard shortcut locks a Windows PC at once? · 1 mark
- In Device Manager, a network adapter shows a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. What does this usually indicate? · 1 mark
- The screen started flickering right after a graphics driver update yesterday. What is the quickest way to return to the previous driver? · 2 marks
- A server restarted unexpectedly overnight. In which Event Viewer log should the administrator first look for shutdown, service and driver events? · 2 marks
- In the Services console, a backup agent is set to “Automatic (Delayed Start)”. What does this mean? · 3 marks
- An administrator wants a clean-up script to run automatically at 18:00 every weekday on a Windows server. Which built-in tool should be used? · 1 mark
- A setting changed under HKEY_CURRENT_USER affects only the signed-in user. Which registry hive holds settings that apply to the whole computer and every user? · 3 marks
- A support article tells a technician to change a value in the Windows Registry. What should they do first? · 1 mark
- A PC freezes randomly, and the technician suspects a third-party service. In System Configuration (msconfig), which approach isolates the cause? · 2 marks
- A user says their PC “has been unstable for a couple of weeks”. Which Windows tool shows a day-by-day timeline of application crashes, Windows failures and software installs to see what changed? · 2 marks
- What is the difference between Windows quality updates and feature updates? · 2 marks
- Staff complain that Windows sometimes restarts for updates while they are working. Which Windows Update setting prevents automatic restarts during the working day? · 1 mark
- A ministry wants its 500 PCs to download Windows updates once from a local server and install only the updates the ICT team has approved. Which solution provides this? · 2 marks
- A data centre runs dozens of production virtual machines on each physical server. Which kind of hypervisor is normally used, and why? · 3 marks
- A trainer installs VirtualBox on their Windows laptop to run an Ubuntu virtual machine for a class. What kind of hypervisor is VirtualBox? · 2 marks
- Before installing a major update on a virtual server, the administrator takes a snapshot (checkpoint). What does this allow, and what is its limit? · 2 marks
- Why can a server run many more containers (for example with Docker) than full virtual machines? · 3 marks
- A new virtual machine will not start, and the hypervisor reports that hardware virtualisation (VT-x/AMD-V) is not available, although the processor supports it. What should the technician do? · 2 marks
- Laptops bought for a district office came with Windows 11 Home, and the technician cannot join them to the Active Directory domain. Why? · 1 mark
- A Windows PC has become slow and unstable, and the user wants a fresh start without losing their documents. What does “Reset this PC” with “Keep my files” do? · 2 marks
- What is the main difference between an in-place upgrade and a clean installation of Windows? · 2 marks
- A user overwrote a report last Tuesday and wants the version from Monday. Which Windows feature, if it had been set up with an external drive, keeps regular copies of files in the user's folders? · 2 marks
- A laptop keeps warning that the C: drive is nearly full. Which Windows 11 feature can automatically remove temporary files and old Recycle Bin items? · 1 mark
- A PC shows a blue screen that says “Your PC ran into a problem” before restarting. What is the most useful thing to note for troubleshooting? · 2 marks
- Python is installed in C:\Python312, but typing python at a command prompt returns “'python' is not recognized as an internal or external command”. What is the likely cause? · 3 marks
- An old payroll program written for an earlier version of Windows shows errors on Windows 11. What can the technician try before looking for a replacement? · 2 marks
- On 64-bit Windows, what is normally installed in the “C:\Program Files (x86)” folder? · 1 mark
- A laptop left in Sleep overnight ran its battery flat, and an unsaved document was lost. Why would Hibernate have avoided this? · 3 marks
- Which tool built into Windows 10 and 11 lets a help-desk technician view and control a user's screen after the user enters a security code the technician gives them? · 1 mark
- Print jobs are stuck in a Windows print queue and cannot be cancelled, even though the printer is online. Which step usually clears them? · 2 marks
- Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora are all called Linux distributions. What does that mean? · 1 mark
- On Linux, installing a web server through the package manager also installs several libraries it needs. What is the main benefit of this approach? · 2 marks
- On most modern Linux distributions, which program does the kernel start first (process ID 1), which then starts and supervises the system's services? · 3 marks
- Which kernel is the Android mobile operating system built on? · 1 mark
- A torch app on an Android phone asks for access to the user's contacts and location. How do modern mobile operating systems handle such requests? · 1 mark
- Why might an administrator choose the Server Core installation option for a new Windows Server that will act as a domain controller? · 3 marks
- Before capturing a prepared Windows installation as an image to deploy to 200 identical PCs, the technician runs Sysprep with the /generalize option. Why? · 3 marks
- A school receives 60 new PCs with empty disks and no USB installers available. Which feature lets them start from the network and receive an operating system image from a deployment server? · 3 marks
- Which Linux command shows the full path of the directory you are currently in? · 1 mark
- A configuration file called .bashrc does not appear when a user runs ls in their home directory. Which command lists it, with details such as permissions and size? · 1 mark
- A user is deep inside /var/www/html/assets/images. Which command takes them straight back to their own home directory? · 2 marks
- Which command creates the directory /srv/backups/2026/september in one step, even if /srv/backups and 2026 do not exist yet? · 2 marks
- Running cp reports that it is omitting the directory project, not copying it. Which command copies the whole directory and its contents to /backup? · 2 marks
- On Linux, how do you rename the file draft.txt to final.txt in the same directory? · 1 mark
- Why must an administrator be especially careful before running rm -rf on a directory? · 2 marks
- rmdir old_logs fails with “Directory not empty”. What does this tell you about rmdir? · 2 marks
- What does touch report.txt do when report.txt already exists and contains data? · 3 marks
- A log file is thousands of lines long, and cat scrolls it past too fast to read. Which command lets you page through it and search, quitting with q? · 1 mark
- Which command displays only the first 20 lines of the file students.csv? · 1 mark
- While reproducing a problem on a web server, an administrator wants to watch new lines appear in /var/log/nginx/error.log as they are written. Which command does this? · 2 marks
- Which command searches /etc and all its subdirectories for files whose names end in .conf? · 2 marks
- After an incident, an analyst wants every file under /var/www that was modified in the last 24 hours. Which command lists them? · 3 marks
- An administrator needs to know which files under /etc/nginx mention the domain portal.gov.rw. Which command finds them? · 2 marks
- A configuration file is full of comment lines starting with #. Which command shows only the lines that are not comments? · 3 marks
- A file applicants.txt has one applicant per line. Which command tells you how many applicants it contains? · 2 marks
- To count how many times each IP address appears in ips.txt, an administrator runs sort ips.txt | uniq -c. Why is sort needed first? · 3 marks
- A nightly script records a line in backup.log. Which redirection adds the new line at the end of the file instead of replacing its contents? · 2 marks
- A command prints normal results and error messages. Which form saves only the error messages to errors.txt, leaving normal output on the screen? · 3 marks