Multitasking means user's ability to initiate several processes to run simultaneously on a given operating system. For example, the user can have several software applications open at the same time, each of which consumes a portion of the computer's available resources.

Multitasking may eventually slow the system down if too many programs are resident in the memory at the same time. This may even result in one or all of the open programs to cease to function, and data may be lost. However, generally switching from one on-going process to another should not cause any loss of data.

See also: Multithreading.