WHAT IS A SOFTWARE?

Software is a collection of instructions and data that tell a computer how to work. This is in contrast to physical hardware, from which the system is built and actually performs the work

Software is a set of instructions, data or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks. It is the opposite of hardware, which describes the physical aspects of a computer. Software is a generic term used to refer to applications, scripts and programs that run on a device. It can be thought of as the variable part of a computer, while hardware is the invariable part.

The two main categories of software are application software and system software An application is software that fulfills a specific need or performs tasks. System software is designed to run a computer’s hardware and provides a platform for applications to run on top of.

Other types of software include programming software, which provides the programming tools software developers need; middleware, which sits between system software and applications; and driver software, which operates computer devices and peripherals.

Early software was written for specific computers and sold with the hardware it ran on. In the 1980s, software began to be sold on floppy disks, and later on CDs and DVDs. Today, most software is purchased and directly downloaded over the internet. Software can be found on vendor websites or application service providerwebsites.

Utility software is a software designed to help to analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure – in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ordinary users.

These softwares are usually used for managing a computer’s device or program. List of important utility programs are as follows:

List of Utility Programs Or Softwares

• System Utilities
• Storage Device Management Utilities
• File Management Utilities
• Miscellaneous Utilities

System Utilities

system utility is a 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 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

The 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 viruse 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 a way to find something quickly

In the PC Windows, Ditto & iClippy are very nice, colorful and does 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 a 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 facility about various aspects of computer networks. Most of them are originated on Unix systems, but the majority of other are later ports to other operating systems.

The most common network utilities are Ping, Traceroute nslookup & vnStat

Package Managers

When you’re working on projects as quite 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 get 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 brings our computers to malfunction. Though, they are not just only the 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 the computer user to get the 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 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. Its smaller size of a file is easy to copy.

Disk Defragmenters

Defragmentation reduces the amount 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 video 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 provides 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 the compression and encryption capabilities. There are some archive utilities that have a separate un-archive utility for the operation reversion. One most famous type of archive file format 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 to 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 contains 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 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 to 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 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 a 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 Utilities

• 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 the 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.

How is utility software helpful?

Utility software is system software designed to help to analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure – in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ordinary users.

What are the benefits of utility software?

Utility software helps the user to control, manage, and maintain a computer’s operating system, hardware and application software. These programs are designed to perform specific functions like finding files, backing up data, playing multimedia files, viewing images and so on.

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