Swapping Exe Process

The Operating system reads the information from process control block of the exe file and loads the exe data and instruction sets to the memory location. Once loaded the Operating see your exe as the running process. The processor will execute the instruction set of the all loaded process (Multi-tasking OS like windows). When the memory required to run the new process waiting in the queue is not adequate and the process has high priority the OS swaps the exe content (Instruction set part) and the state (All the global variable values) to the physical disc. The process (Your exe) is not terminated and suspended for some time. Once your process needs the execution of instruction set, OS will take the Image of the process from the disc and keeps that in main memory. This is called swapping. Some people say virtual memory. This is shown below:

In the above picture, processor executes the instruction set from code segment of exe, which allocated on the main memory. When they're multiple processes to manage the limited availability of the main memory, sometime the OS swaps the exe process to disc. In the above case, Exe process P1, P2 and P3 in Main memory. And P4 and P5 are kept is physical disc as temporarily suspended.