Utility Software

What is Utility Software?

Utility software is system software designed to help analyse, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. Utility software usually focuses on how the computer infrastructure (including the computer hardware, operating system, and software and data storage) operates.

           

What is Anti-virus Software and how does it work?

Antivirus (or anti-virus) software is used to safeguard a computer from malware, including viruses, computer worms, and Trojan horses. Antivirus software may also remove or prevent spyware and aware along with other forms of malicious programs.

Viruses, Trojan horses, and worms

Virus: A computer virus attaches itself to a program or file enabling it to spread from one computer to another, leaving infections as it travels. A computer virus can range in severity: some may cause only mildly annoying effects while others can damage your hardware, software or files. Almost all viruses are attached to an executable file, which means the virus may exist on your computer but it actually cannot infect your computer unless you run or open the malicious program.

Trojan horse: The Trojan Horse at first glance will appear to be useful software but will actually do damage once installed or run on your computer.  Those on the receiving end of a Trojan Horse are usually tricked into opening them because they appear to be receiving legitimate software or files from a legitimate source.  When a Trojan is activated on your computer, the results can vary. Some Trojans are designed to be more annoying than malicious (like changing your desktop, adding silly active desktop icons) or they can cause serious damage by deleting files and destroying information on your system.

Worms: A worm is similar to a virus by design and is considered to be a sub-class of a virus. Worms spread from computer to computer, but unlike a virus, it has the capability to travel without any human action. A worm takes advantage of file or information transport features on your system, which is what allows it to travel unaided.

What is a firewall and why would we use one?

Protect a network or system from unauthorized access with a firewall.

What is encryption and why would we use it?

Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. Unencrypted data is called plain text; encrypted data is referred to as cipher text.

  

What is disc management software and why do we need it?

Disk Management is an extension of the Microsoft Management Console that allows full management of the disk-based hardware recognized by Windows. Disk Management is used to manage the drives installed in a computer - like hard disk drives (internal and external), optical disk drives, and flash drives.

What is disc defragmentation and how does it work?

Disk Defragmenter is a tool that rearranges the data on your volume and reunites fragmented data so your computer can run more efficiently. In this version of Windows, Disk Defragmenter runs on a schedule so you don't have to remember to run it, although you can still run it manually or change the schedule it uses.

What is system maintenance software and why do we need it?

Software maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes. A common perception of maintenance is that it merely involves fixing defects. However, one study indicated that over 80% of maintenance effort is used for non-corrective actions. This perception is perpetuated by users submitting problem reports that in reality are functionality enhancements to the system, [citation needed] More recent studies put the bug-fixing proportion closer to 21%.

What are development or dev tools and why do we use them?

Web development tools allow web developers to test and debug their code. They are different from website builders and IDEs in that they do not assist in the direct creation of a webpage, rather they are tools used for testing the user facing interface of a website or web application.

     

Explain what an assembly language is and what we use an assembler for.

An assembly language is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable device, in which there is a very strong (generally one-to-one) correspondence between the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Each assembly language is specific to particular computer architecture, in contrast to most high-level programming languages, which are generally portable across multiple architectures, but require interpreting or compiling. Assembly language is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler; the conversion process is referred to as assembly, or assembling the code. Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent each low-level machine instruction or operation.