A form of multitasking where the programs themselves decide when to end their timeslices and allow other programs the chance to run. POE uses cooperative multitasking. Cooperative multitasking can be dangerous because a single thread or process can hold a timeslice indefinitely. It can also be more efficient: The system spends less time switching between threads, so it has more opportunity to run the code within them. see: pre-emptive multitasking, timeslice
A type of multitasking where the operating system assigns an equal amount of processor cycles to each application, regardless of how much power it actually needs. Preemtive multitasking (used in Windows95) is more efficient than the cooperative multitasking found in Windows 3.1.