Utility Software

What is utility software

• Utility software is software containing programs designed to help to maintain a computer system

• Utility software is designed to perform a additional tasks that may not be carried out by an operating system.

• Utility software interacts with the computers hardware, for example, secondary storage devices

• Some utility software comes installed with the operating system

What is Defragmentation and how does fragmentation work

• Defragmentation software, groups fragmented files back together in order to reduce movement of a read/write head across surface of disk which speeds up file access time

• Fragmentation works as programs and data are added to a new hard disk drive, it is added in order, over time as files are deleted this leaves gaps

• As programs and data are added over time, these gaps get filled and data becomes fragmented

Where can defragmentation only happen

Only be used in magnetic stage

Why should SSDs(solid state drives) not be defragmentated

As they gave no moving parts,

-It shortens their lifespan as SSDs have limited number of read/writes

What is Data compression in utility software

-Compression utilises reduce the size of a file and so that it takes less space and it’s quicker to download over the internet

How is encryption in utility software used

• Encryption is the process of scrambling data using an algorithm from plain-text into cipher-text in order to make it unreadable to users without the master key

• Encryption software enhances the security of the computer system and keeps data safe