ICT - Unit 2: D1

ICT - Unit 2: Task 5

Software utilities

Software utilities are helping to analyze, maintain, optimize and configure a computer. There is many software utilities for example Anti-virus, Backup software, Data compression, Cryptographic, Disk cleaners, Disk storage, File managers or Memory testers.

Security virus protection and firewalls

Virus protection software protects computer from viruses by scanning a computer system to find threats and protect system against them. Example of such threats could be viruses, worms or trojans. Antivirus is really important in order to secure data and control upon computer because if computer would get virus the hacker that created the virus would be able to control computer and steal from it personal details and other important data. Antivirus should be updated as often as possible because new viruses are being created all the time and if antivirus. Firewall is another software utility and it is used for monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic of the computer that is connected to a network so no threats could get into computer.

Virus protection like Antiviruses and Firewalls improves performance of the computer by protecting it against threats like viruses, worms and trojans because those can destroy system of the computer so it wouldn't work at all, create some errors that would make problems to users of the computer or they could try to access some data and send them back to hacker and that would slow down the computer. If good antivirus is in place anything of that shouldn’t happen and therefore performance of the computer will remain at the highest possible level that software and hardware enables.

Clean up tools for removal of cookies

Clean up tools are computer utilities that are used to keep system in good conditions by taking care that unwanted files will be deleted. Operating systems usually come with their own built in clean up tools, in Windows that would be Disk Cleanup. That can be used for example for removing of cookies because they could slow performance of the computer or for removing unwanted files and cleaning the recycle bin in order to delete items from hard drive of the computer permanently.

Cookie files are relatively small but the more of them is the more they will slow down performance of the computer and there will be tons of them after some time and that could create really big problem for anyone who is using internet on particular computer because loading of websites would take a lot of time and therefore it is really good to from time to time delete those cookie files and that can do for you Clean Up tools. If you would like to keep performance of you computer as high as possible the best thing to do would probably be to schedule cleaning of cookie files always after some time, so you wouldn’t have to care about them anymore.

Drive formatting

Drive formatting is used in order to create space on hard drive for new data. That is done by deleting the file directory so disk doesn’t know that there are any data on hard drive anymore and new data can be written by rewriting the old data. Data aren’t really deleted until they are rewritten by new data and therefore they can be retrieved.

Drive formatting creates new space on hard drive and that increases performance of the computer because the less space on hard drive is used the better is performance of the computer in terms of data storage. Other thing that could slow down the computer are corrupted files but drive formatting will get them back into their uncorrupted state and therefore they cannot slow down computer anymore.