Yes, Windows CE is a hard real-time operating system that provides you with the technologies that are important to real-time development, including: • 256 levels of thread priority — Provides greater flexibility in controlling the scheduling of threads within an embedded system. • Nested interrupts — Allows interrupts that are at higher priority levels to be serviced immediately, instead of having them wait for a lower priority interrupt service routine (ISR) to complete. The kernel can nest as many ISRs as supported by the CPU. • Per-thread quantums — Allows an application to set the quantum on a thread-by-thread basis. This means that you can adapt the scheduler to the current needs of your application. Priority inversion — Refers to a situation in which the use of a mutex, critical section, or semaphore resource by a lower-priority thread delays the execution of a higher-priority thread, when both are contending for the same resources. To correct this situation and free the higher-priority thread, Windows CE allows the lower-priority thread to inherit the more critical thread's priority and run at the higher priority until it releases its use of the resource.