The CRK is based on Windows Internals, 4th edition (Microsoft Press, 2005) by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon. The experiments, lab descriptions, quizzes, and assignments, which are an integral part of the course materials, have been tested over the last five years in an Operating Systems Architecture class taught by Andreas Polze at Humboldt University of Berlin and Hasso-Plattner-Institute at University Potsdam, Germany.

The CRK is a pool of materials and resources that explain OS concepts based on the Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating system family, structured following the IEEE-CS/ACM Operating System Body of Knowledge (BOK) as defined in the Computing Curriculum 2001 project by the joint IEEE-CS and ACM Task Force (CC2001).

Principal Structuring of the Learning Materials:
?This version of the CRK materials consists of 15 unitsfive core and seven elective units from the BOK and three supplementary units covering additional topics outside the scope of the BOK. For each of the units there are basic and advanced modules. The units are scaleable to multiple academic levels and can be used by faculty, in whole or in part, for teaching OS courses in academic institutions. 
?The basic modules provide materials to incorporate into a complete undergraduate level OS course of one semester in length. This covers the Windows operating system specific topics in the core and elective units at minimum (or basic) level of coverage of BOK as defined in CC2001. 
?The advanced modules provide materials to incorporate into an advanced (undergraduate or graduate) level OS course of one semester in length. The module covers the Windows operating system specific topics in the core and elective units of CC2001 (extended level of coverage). 
?A lecturer may choose to use the basic course materials in order to augment an existing (undergraduate) OS course with information regarding the Windows operating system family. However, by combining the basic and advanced sections of the materials supplied herein, a potential lecturer may give a fully featured one semester (undergraduate) operating system course. Another option would be the usage of the advanced sections only in order to give a special (graduate) lecture or seminar on operating system internals and a comparison of architectural and design decisions and their impact for a number of different operating systems.

ProjectOZ is an alternative to Unix-based simulators for exploring operating system principles. Based on the SPACE OS research at UC Santa Barbara, ProjectOZ builds simple, clean user-mode abstractions for the CPU, MMU, trap mechanism, and physical memory using the native NT layer of Windows, and then layers on top a simplified kernel-based OS which students can modify to perform experiments. Because there is an actual OS underneath handling the hardware details as opposed to a simulator, students have more time to explore kernels at the algorithm and data structure level. ProjectOZ supports experiments with multiprocessors and multicomputers on a student's single uniprocessor PC.