Chapter 3 Software

Chapter 3 Software

1. Utility software: is the basic software included with operating systems to performing common housekeeping tasks, helping to maintain and manage the computer.

   • Disk Defragmentation: Optimises hard disk performance by arranging files into contiguous sectors.
   • Backup programs: Used to compress and back up important files.
   • Encryption: Secure files, folders, and disks in the event of theft or loss of the computer.
   • System Monitoring: Monitors system resources such as processor and memory usage and optimises them to improve performance.
   • Disk Clean up: Detects and deletes unneeded files, such as temporary files created by some applications, that have built up over time.
   • Accessibility options: Sets options for disabled users such as increased font size or screen contrast.
   • Anti Virus software: Used to detect and remove malicious software such as viruses and spyware.
   • System updates: Updates the operating system with the latest security and performance patches released by the softwares creators.
   • Compression software: Used to compress files to save disk space or network bandwidth and decompress them again.

2. Backups

   • Regularly creating and testing backup copies of data is an essential computing task. Businesses rely on their customer, product and sales data to operate. While more and more of our personal photos, music, documents and communications are stored only on computers.
   • Data can be deleted or corrupted due to hardware failure, software errors, user error, or malicious software. Portable devices containing important data can easily be misplaced or stolen
   • Data can be backed up to a variety of devices including internal or external hard disk, writeable optical disks such as CD-Rs or DVD-RW, or specialist backup devices such as tape drives.
   • A full backup is a complete backup of all data on a computer system. An incremental backup is used to backup only the files that have changed since the last backup

3. Operating Systems

   • Also called system software, is responsible for managing and controlling all of the computers hardware. When you first switch on the computer the operating system software is loaded into the computers memory and started before you can perform any other tasks. The operating system runs the entire time you are using the computer and provides the user interface to manage programs and data.
   • On its own the operating system does not enable you to produce work instead it provides a platform on which application software can run.
   • Tasks include:
     • Task and memory management: It is the job of the operating system to manage these programs, assign them the resources they need, and protect or isolate programs from each other so that one program cannot corrupt another programs data.
     • Security management: The operating system provides security for multiple users by requiring each user to authenticate themselves with a username and password.
     • Providing a user interface: The operating system provides an interface to allow the user to interact with and operate the computer. Typically this will be either a command line interface CLI where the user types a series of commands using the keyboard or a graphical user interface GUI operated with a mouse or similar pointing device.
     • Communicating with hardware: Operating system controls all hardware devices such as disk drives, printers, and screens that are attached to the computer. It does this transparently to the user.