1.5 UTILITY SOFTWARE

Utility programs help manage, maintain and control computer resources. These programs are available to help you with the day-to-day chores associated with personal computing and to keep your system running at peak performance. 

Some of utility programs are discussed below:

Anti-virus software 

Computer viruses are software programs that are deliberately designed to interfere with computer operation; record, corrupt, or delete data; or spread themselves to other computers and throughout the Internet. Virus Scanning Software are utility programs designed to protect your computer from computer viruses, worms and trojan horses.

Historically, computer viruses were associated with self-reproducing executable programs that manipulated or even destroyed data on infected computers. They were known to spread by infected floppy disks, network or other hardware media. With the advent of internet, the viruses spread online as well. They can also spread through powerful macros used in word processor applications, like MS Word, or email programs where viruses are embedded in the email body itself and reproduce when the message is just opened or previewed. 

To help prevent the most current viruses, you must update your antivirus software regularly. You can set up most types of antivirus software to update automatically.

 Most anti-virus programs use one of the following techniques to identify viruses:

1. Signature based detection: This is the most common method. It compares the contents of the infected file to a known pattern of data. Because viruses can embed themselves in existing files, the entire file is searched.

2. Heuristic-based detection: This method is primarily used to identify unknown viruses by looking for malicious code or variations of such code.

3. File emulation: This is another heuristic approach in which the infected program is run in a virtual environment and the actions it performs are recorded. The actions are analyzed to check for any malicious actions and carry out disinfection actions accordingly.

No matter how useful antivirus software can be, these can sometimes have some drawbacks. 

• Antivirus software can impair a computer's performance. Active anti-virus programs can cause conflicts with other programs. 
• A "false positive" is when antivirus software identifies a non-malicious file as a virus. When this happens, it can cause serious problems. For example, if an antivirus program is configured to immediately delete infected files, a false positive in a essential file can render the operating system or some applications unusable. 
• Most popular anti-virus programs are not very effective against new viruses. The reason for this is that the virus designers test their new viruses on the major anti-virus applications to make sure that they are not detected before releasing them into the market.
• Some apparent antivirus programs are actually malware being sold as legitimate software, such as Win Fixer and MS Antivirus. 
• Some commercial antivirus software agreements include a clause that the subscription will be automatically renewed. For example, McAfee requires users to unsubscribe at least 60 days before the expiration of the present subscription. Norton Antivirus also renews subscriptions automatically by default. 
• Finally, antivirus software generally runs at the highly trusted kernel level of the operating system, creating a potential avenue of attack

Despite the drawbacks, anti-virus software have become a necessity these days. A number of popular anti-virus programs include those by Kaspersky, Symantec, McAfee, and Norton. The cost of the program increases with the increase in the number of virus detection and removal features and ease they offer. 

Backup utilities 

Backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. All types of data could be backed up like pictures, word documents, files, executables or an entire database. 

The main purpose is to recover data in the event of data loss or data getting corrupt. Other purpose could be to recover historical data. 

A number of Backup software are available that assist you in taking backup of your important data on the computer. Selecting between various back-up software is not only a based on the cost but also on the software that meeting the requirements. 

A backup software could allow automated scheduling of backup in addition to just creating copy of files. The software should be easy to install and maintain. It should be intuitive and easy to use. The restoring from the back-up should be simple. Accessing restored data should be automatic, and the backup should preserve original data files and paths. A backup software that can compress data helps in storing data in lesser space. Certain software also allows securing the backed-up data with passwords and encryption. Good documentation and technical support goes a long way in ensuring help is available when needed. 

Backup could be taken on variety of media including hard drive, CDs, DVDs, floppy disks etc. It could also be taken on FTP locations, tape or online servers. A number of free and proprietary back-up software are available including those from Microsoft, Symantec, Apple, IBM, and Norton. 

It is important to take backup of important data regularly and also verify that it can be restored successfully.

Diagnostic programs 

A diagnostic program is a program written for the purpose of locating problems with the software, hardware, or both, or a network of systems. A diagnostic program provides solutions to the user to solve issues. 

In practical experience, these tools do not usually identify the exact cause of the system problem, but they often provide some information about what is in the system and how it is working. Some of these are free or are included with common operating systems at no additional charge, while others are commercial products that range from affordable to rather pricey. 

Here are some common software diagnostic tools. 

• Power-On Self Test (POST) : This isn't a separate diagnostic utility; it is in fact built into your system BIOS and it runs every time you start up your PC automatically. It is often the best indicator of system problems. Don't disable its error-reporting functions unless you really need to. 
• MEM.EXE : This simple utility, built into Windows operating system that provides you with details about your memory configuration, as well as what is currently using your memory. 
• Microsoft Diagnostics : Better known as "MSD.EXE", this is a small DOS utility that takes a brief inventory of the contents of your PC and shows them to you in a text-based format. This is very useful for seeing what disks are in the system, how much memory is installed, and also for checking system resource usage. It will show you what type of BIOS you are using. 
• The Windows Device Manager : This is the most useful tool for identifying system configuration and resource usage information. 
• Norton System Information : This utility is similar to the Microsoft Diagnostics, only more detailed in its later versions. SI shows a great deal of information about what is in the PC, going well beyond what MSD gives you, but really is still an information utility as opposed to a true diagnostic. This program is part of Symantec's Norton Utilities. 
• Microsoft ScanDisk and Norton Disk Doctor : These programs are used to check for hard disk problems. This includes file system corruption and hard disk read errors. They should be used when hard disk problems are suspected. 
• Scandisk is a utility provided with Windows computers. Scandisk scans your disks to see if there are any potential problems on the disk, such as bad disk areas. Since disks are magnetic media, all disks, including your hard drive can be corrupted 
• Microsoft Disk Defragmenter software assists you in keep reorganizing your disk drives. After files are saved, deleted and resaved again, the disk can become fragmented --- available space is in small blocks located throughout the disk. Disk defragmenters gather those free spots and put them together to enable you to continue to save your data in the most efficient manner. 
• Norton Diagnostics : This utility is meant to go beyond the System Information program and actually perform tests on the hardware to identify problems. It includes tests of the processor and motherboard and system memory, and will identify some types of resource conflicts. In reality, it is still quite limited in terms of the numbers of problems it will find. 
• QAPlus : QAPlus from DiagSoft is a more advanced diagnostic suite that comes in several flavours, depending on what you need to do and how you want to do it. This is a more expensive package but can give you much more detailed information about your system and help identify problem situations as well.

File view programs

File view utilities let you see the contents of a wide variety of documents even when you don't have the application on your system 

A file viewer is limited-functionality software it does not have a capability to create a file, or modify the content of an existing one. Instead, it is used only to display or print the content. File viewers do not edit files, but they are able to save data in a different file format. 

All the fundamental types of file viewers are filters which translate binary files into plain text (one example antiword). Another common type of file viewer is a picture viewer that can display picture files of various formats. Common features here are thumbnail preview and creation, and image zooming. 

The primary reason behind limited functionality is marketing and control. For example, a popular software program, Adobe Acrobat, can be used to create content for most computer platforms, under various operating systems. To ensure that people can access the documents created with Adobe Acrobat, the software publisher created a viewer program, the Acrobat Reader, and made it available for free. This viewer application allows the content created by the proprietary authoring software to be readable on all supported operating-system platforms, free of charge, thus making it a more attractive solution. 

There are many products which can qualify as a file viewer: Microsoft Word viewer or Microsoft PowerPoint viewer, and the Open Office equivalents are examples. In a sense, a web browser is a type of file viewer, which translates, or renders, the HTML markups into a human-friendly presentation. Although HTML is plain text, viewing an HTML file in a browser and in a text editor produces significantly different results. 

Google Docs is another very good example of online file viewer. Google Docs Viewer supports 12 new file types in, including all remaining Microsoft Office file types, Apple's Pages format, and Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator files.

Computer performance enhancement utilities 

A number of utilities are available to improve the overall performance of the computer system by letting you speed up your system or increase storage space. These utilities range from those that come packaged with the operating system or can be purchased separately. 

Disk defragmenter utility reorganizes non contiguous files into contiguous files and optimizes their placement on the hard drive for increased reliability and performance. 

There are many hardware and software accelerators available to enhance performance in a particular area. For example, download accelerators are software tools to increase the download speed, while graphic accelerators are coprocessors that assist in drawing graphics. 

The Windows registry can quickly become crowded and hence slower to search when you remove unused programs that do not uninstall properly. There are utilities like Registry Mechanic or Registry Clean Expert that can help clean Windows registry to improve performance.