Utility programs are used for the management of computer systems and also perform maintenance types of tasks. Types of utility programs include both as a part of operating systems like internet explorer and stand-alone forms like VLC media player & google chrome.
Utility Program
A type of system software used to solve a particular problem of a user is called a utility program. These are built-in into operating systems as well as available as stand-alone products like security suits. These are designed to help, analyze, configure, and maintain computer systems.
The Function of Utility Program
Functions of utility software
The purpose of utility Software is to manage matters associated with the analysis, configuration, optimization (performance improvement), and maintenance of a computer system. In other words, this software is usually used to support computer infrastructure and manage system resources.
Types of Utility Programs
Many operating systems provide different types of utility programs to resolve common issues of software and hardware. Two types of utility programs are built-in (Disk scanner, Disk defragmenter, File viewer) and stand-alone utility (antivirus, Winzip, WinRAR, Google Chrome).
These are usually used for managing a computer’s device or program. The list of important utility programs are as follows:
List of Utility Programs
System Utilities
Storage Device Management Utilities
File Management Utilities
Miscellaneous Utilities
System Utilities
system utility or windows utility programs is system software designed to help analyze configure optimize or maintain your system. utility software along with operating system software is a type of system software to support the computer infrastructure, distinguishing it from applications software that is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit you the ordinary users.
Anti-virus
Clipboard managers
Computer access control
Debuggers
Diagnostic programs
Network utilities
Package managers
Registry cleaners
System monitors
System profilers
Anti Virus
An antivirus is a software that assists the operating system in providing a virus-free environment to the users. If I have an anti-virus installed on my system, I can rest assured that there will be no virus attack on my system. The antivirus can detect many types of viruses like Worm, Spyware, Trojan & Boot virus.
The Boot virus affects the booting system from where your computer starts. The antivirus also can be set up so that your computer is scanned periodically. If any virus has crept into it, despite an antivirus being installed.
Antivirus is used to identify and eliminate viruses is called antivirus software. Antivirus programs enclose information about different identified viruses. They can identify viruses and also get rid of them.
Furthermore, the Antivirus program not only detects viruses from a computer but also prevents new viruses from entering into the computer. Some important antivirus programs are McAfee, Norton Antivirus, and Doctor Solomon’s Antivirus also. McAfee and Norton are the two most commonly used antivirus programs in the Windows operating system.
The Boot virus affects the booting system from where your computer starts. The antivirus also can be set up so that your computer is scanned periodically. If any virus has crept into it, despite an antivirus being installed.
Clipboard Managers
You know we live in a copy and past world, right? So, we’re constantly copying and pasting things from the internet and sharing them with other people and it’s images and text and all kinds of stuff. And there are times at least in my workflow where I feel like I am copying and pasting and copying and pasting.
It gets a little challenging or arduous to flip back and forth between screens all the time. There’s a whole class and category of software out there called clipboard managers that works great for giving you a history of things that you’ve copied and pasted in the past. They provide you with a way to find something quickly.
In the PC Windows, Ditto & Clippy are very nice, colorful, and do a lot. The one that really kind of appealed to me though is called Ditto. I don’t know why I like it so much. I just feel like a have an affinity for this particular one. On the Mac, there are free ones like FlyCut.
Computer Access Control
Computer access control manages the identification, authorization, authentication, access approval, and audit. A more narrow definition of access control would cover only access approval where the system grants permission or reject requests for access to system resources.
Debuggers
A debugger is computer software used to check and debug other targeted programs. The main purpose of a debugger is to run the targeted program and allow the programmer to follow up its in-progress operations and monitor changes in computer resources that may indicate malfunctioning code.
Diagnostic Program
A diagnostic program is an automatic software sequence that defines the operational status inside the software, hardware, or any combination of components, a system, or a network of systems. Diagnostic programs provide guidance to the users about any issues or problems found during its operation.
Diagnostic programs are also built-in inside the consumer electronic products and games. Generally, if the owner of an electronic device tries to access the hidden diagnostic program or asks its manufacturer, they may reply to the consumer that the information is “confidential” and cannot be shared.
Network Utilities
Network utilities are software utilities developed to monitor, analyze, and provide configuration facilities about various aspects of computer networks. Most of them are originated on Unix systems, but the majority of others are later ports to other operating systems.
The most common network utilities are Ping, Traceroute lookup & vnStat
Package Managers
When you’re working on projects as quiet comments, want to include codes that other people have written. Whether that be in the form of libraries or extensions or anything else, the problem is however how do you go about downloading, installing, and configuring those plugins or libraries in a reliable way.
Such that you can easily upgrade them if there is an update downloading code from GitHub and unzip and getting into a specific folder isn’t very reliable. And it’s very easy to make a mistake and accidentally unpack a folder into the wrong directory. This is where package managers come in.
Package managers are for a solution that integrates the entire process you specify which packages you want to include in your project as well as which versions you want to include. The package manager is then responsible for all of those tasks.
For example, downloading the package unzipping, youth’s checking for updates, and ultimately leaving you to focus on writing your code rather than trying to monitor the safer packages that someone else is maintaining.
The ideas have been used for many years in the Linux community where you have tools like it up to get and Yung amongst others accepts. They’re focused on entire programs, not just specific packages as we’re going to talk about.
Finally, it’s important to notice that the package mum just tends to focus on only one programming language. For example, it’s unlikely that’s a PHP-based package manager would be able to be used within a Java environment or vice-versa.
Registry Cleaners
Registry cleaners are the most important computer maintenance tools. Without them, registry corruption would run spreading throughout our windows registries and bring our computers to malfunction. Though, they are not just only maintenance tools. It’s very important to have these tools installed on our PCs.
They should be there right alongside our virus and spyware cleaners in earlier versions of windows. When an operating system becomes bogged down due to registry corruption, it is really noticeable. Just like in Windows 95 base registry corruption can bring us to the point where we would need to reformat a hard drive and reinstall the operating system that needs this.
Using a registry cleaner program will eliminate corruption from the Windows registry and by doing so guards against needing to reformat our hard drives. When we use our registry cleaner periodically, we stop problems before they creep upon us.
This of course is the wise thing to do. It is certainly better than needing to reinstate our operating system and news all the information from our hard drive as a result.
System Monitors
A system monitor can be a hardware or software component used to keep an eye on system resources and performance in a computer system. The system monitoring tools management responsibilities includes resource usage and privacy.
System Profilers
System profilers is a computer program that enables computer users to get complete information about installed software and hardware. The system profiler is a component of the IDE tooling. It allows you to visualize Colonel instrumentation log files.
Furthermore, It helps you with performing the analysis of those log files and you can also do a limited amount of capture and control from within the IDE using the system profiler.
Storage Device Management Utilities
Backup software
Disk Scanners
Disk compression
Disk defragmenters
Disk formatters
Disk partition editors
Disk space analyzers
Backup Software
Backup software is used to make the backup of data and files. This utility program is used when data is lost or deleted unexpectedly. The backup software is a program that provides an easy way to take backup. Some types of operating systems also provide this facility.
Disk Scanner
A disk scanner is used to detect the physical and logical problems of a disk. All operating systems provide disk scanners to manage computer disks.
Disk Compressor
A file compressor is used to shrink the size of files or content available on the disk. This will increase the capacity of the disk. The compressed file is sometimes called a zipped file. The smaller size of a file is easy to copy.
Disk Defragmenters
Defragmentation reduces the number of fragmented files on your hard drive. It reorganizes related data files and puts them in the same physical location on your hard drive. For example, as you install data on your hard drive such as programs documents music videos, and so on.
Well, that data is actually divided into multiple chunks of data that are stored on the hard drive. After a while, all of your data is spread out and mixed in with other data files. When you do a defrag, the defrag will reassemble all of the related chunks of data that have been broken up and it’ll put them together in the same physical location.
So it’s going to put all the files that belong to a certain program, together with all the files that belong to a certain video, together with the same with documents, music, and so on. And it’s also going to put all the free space on the hard drive together as well.
Disk Formatters
Disk formatters are the utilities that get ready the data storage devices like hard disk, magnetic disk, or USB flash drive ready for initial use. Generally, These utilities are used to permanently erase an entire disk drive or device.
Disk Partition Editors
Disk partitioning or disk slicing means creating one or more regions on a secondary storage disk in order to manage each region separately. These regions are known as partitions. It is the first step of preparing a newly installed disk drive before the creation of any file system.
this partition editor divides a single drive into multiple logical drives, each having its own file system. this file system is mounted by the operating system and treated as an individual drive.
Disk Space Analyzer
A disk space analyzer is a computer program utility for the visual representation of disk space usage by getting the size of every folder as well as files in that folder or drive. Mostly the applications analyze this information for the purpose to generate a graphical chart showing disk usage distribution according to folders or other user-defined criteria.
Some famous disk space analyzers such as DiskReport provide the analysis of the history of size and file count for each folder, in order to find growing folders. Important examples are DiskReport & GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer.
File Management Utilities
Archivers
Cryptographic
Data compression
Data conversion
Data recovery
Data synchronization
File synchronization
Revision control
File comparison
File managers
Achievers
Archivers utilities produce a stream or a single file as an output when provided with a directory or a set of files. Archive suites have compression and encryption capabilities. There are some archive utilities that have a separate un-archive utility for the operation reversion. One most famous types of archive file formats is the zip file.
Cryptographic
cryptography utilities are essentially important because it allows you to securely protect data that you don’t want anyone else to have access to. It is used to protect corporate secrets, secure classified information, and protect personal information to guard against things like identity theft.
Data Compression
It’s the art of reducing the number of bits you need to store and transmit data. The reason I say art is because there’s really no optimal approach. It always kind of depends on the type of data that you’re trying to compress. So there are a few Universal strategies that will compress your data fairly well.
But the best strategies are always going to be the ones that can make inferences about the types of data that they’re taking in. Its efficiency is generally measured in by something called the compression ratio which is just the ratio of the uncompressed file size to the compressed file size.
So if you can reduce the file size by half it has a compression ratio of two and there are two real main types of compression lossless and lossy.
Data Conversion
Data conversion is the process of converting computer data from one format to another desired format. In a computer-based environment, data is encoded in a huge number of ways. For example, computer hardware is built on the basis of certain standards which contain the required data such as parity bit checks.
Data Recovery
Data recovery is a process of fetching inaccessible, misplaced, corrupted, destroyed or formatted data from permanent storage, removable media like USB & Floppy Disk, when the stored data inside them cannot be accessed through the traditional way.
The data is always tried to be protected using storage media like internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives, USB drives, magnetic tape drives like CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices.
Recovery is used to recover the lost data because of physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being accessed by the host operating system (OS).
Data Synchronization
Data synchronization utilities are used to establish consistency within data from a source and the target data storage and vice versa as well as continuous compatibility of the data over time. It is the base for a large number of applications like file synchronization and mobile device synchronization e.g, for PDAs.
File Comparison
File comparison utilities produce a standalone power to find out the differences between files. In the computer science field, file comparison referred to the process of calculating and presenting the differences and similarities among data objects, typically a text file having the source code.
File Manager
A file manager is software that provides a user interface to easily manage files and folders on the computer system. The major operations that took place on files or groups of files include creating, opening, printing, renaming, copying, removing.
Furthermore, it also includes searching for files, as well as modifying file attributes, properties, and file permissions. Folders and files may be displayed in a hierarchical manner dependent on their directory structure. Some file managers contain forward and back navigational buttons being inspired by web browsers.
Miscellaneous Types of Utility Programs
File Viewer
Diagnostic Utilities
Disk Defragmenter
Backup Utility
Data Recovery Utility
File Viewer
File viewer is used for viewing and managing files in a computer system. All operating systems provide file viewers. Windows Explorer is also an example of a file viewer.
Diagnostic Utilities
The diagnostic utility is used to detect problems of hardware and also of software. furthermore, all operating systems provide different diagnostic utilities to manage the computer system.
Disk Defragmenter
Disk defragmenter software is used to recognize the files on the disk. It also manages the unused space on the disk so that the operating system may use data more quickly.
Data Recovery Utility
Data recovery utility is used to restore the data that has been damaged or corrupted also. The data can be damaged by hardware failure, power fluctuation, viruses, the bad software also.
