Utilities for Managing Operating Systems

Disk management: managing long-term and short-term forms of storage

• Manage hard drives, optical drives, and other storage media

• Creating and deleting partitions

• Formatting partitions

Partitions: Clear portion of the hard drive you want to use OR attach a file system to a portion of the hard drive

• Primarily purely organizational

New Technology File System (NTFS): Windows current file system

Device management: can find hardware components within the computer

• Identify the hardware specs of a device

• Update a driver

• Rolling back (or undoing an update) a driver

• Uninstalling a driver

Process management: utility allowing users to start, stop, and restart system processes

• Task manager: offers users the ability to…

  • Start, Stop, and Restart system processes

  • Enable or Disable services

  • View a graphical chart of system resources

• Process: applications in use

Task Scheduling: utility that allows you to create automated tasks

• Allows operating system functions and tasks to be completed faster than they would using manual access

  • Displaying messages

  • Sending emails

  • Executing applications

Access Control Protection: define who has access to files in the operating system and what they can do

• Who can create new users and groups

• Who can install and uninstall applications

• Who can set additional permissions on other items

  • Permissions: who can read, edit, or run programs in personal files

User Account Control (UAC): How Microsoft manages access control