Purpose of various software utilities Essay

Virus protection – virus protection protects a computer system from malicious viruses and Trojans and worms which you can be infected by through the internet or email or downloading files or through a USB flash drive etc. virus protection usually consists of a firewall, virus scanner, virus remover and spyware. With virus protection you can perform a scan on your computer to check if you have been infected by any viruses or Trojans or worms. With some virus protections software’s you can scan your computer then it will ask you if you want the viruses removed, also if any programs have been infected the virus protection will ask you if you want the infected program deleted, most virus protection programs quarantine the infected programs in case they are not really viruses. The main purpose of anti-virus software is to protect your computer form getting viruses, it does this by scanning downloads and attachments for viruses, it does this in the background while the user is performing other tasks. If the user does come across a virus the program will warn the user and give the user the option of deleting it before it infects the computer. Some virus protection programs protect the user against spyware, this is a malicious program that enters a computer through internet, the threat usually comes through pop-up ads or bad internet websites, if a threat does come through the virus protection will warn the user and give the user an option to eliminate the threat before it harms the computer. Firewalls – the purpose of a firewall is to block intruders by looking for suspicious words such as domain names or IP addresses, certain protocols like file transfer protocol, ports and routing through a proxy service. There are two types of firewalls, hardware firewalls and software firewalls. Software firewalls provide another coating of security, software firewalls prohibit malware on your computer from being sent to others. Hardware firewalls treat any kind of traffic from travelling from a local network out to the internet as safe. An example of a threat entering your computer could be, you visit a website that contains a hidden malicious program that’s designed to secretly install itself on your machine and then send information out via the internet, this maybe to steal personal information, this is one method of infection. It is very dangerous to operate the internet without a firewall because then you will not be notified if a malicious program is trying to enter your computer and if you  do not have a firewall it will not be able to protect you from malicious programs that will damage your computer. A hardware firewall is a physical device that connects to a computer and is configurable through connection to it or either through using the internet browser or through a command line interface. Clean up tools e.g. removal of cookies, internet history and defragmentation – the cookies in your browser are meant to make pages load faster, but they eventually start to slow down the system, overall the cookie files will become very large and this will impact on the overall speed of the system, this is where you could implement the cleaning software, the cleaning software scans for and deletes old and unnecessary data then after doing the clean-up procedure pages will take longer to open but this is normal. Internet history is a record of an internet user’s visited websites, downloaded files, saved passwords, saved internet files and cookies. By removing all your internet history is makes your computer system faster because there is more space to store files, also by removing your internet history all saved passwords will get deleted and all files downloaded will also get deleted. You should remove your internet history every couple of weeks so your history doesn’t get cluttered up, this is what makes your internet slow. Removal of internet history can be done very easily using the internet options, you can go to the tools section of your web browser. Most internet browsers such as internet explorer and Mozilla Firefox allow you to select the categories to delete internet history, this way it is much easier if you only want to delete one category instead of deleting all the categories, for example if you want to erase form data you simply click on erase form data to delete all the history in that category. When removing internet history it also gives you the option to delete cookies, deleting cookies often is a good thing because you can get hackers that use trackers to monitor your browsing activity and they can steal personal or private information. Fragmentation can cause a computer to run slower and processing problems can emerge when opening files. A defragmentation program will take the corrupted and scattered data on the drive and physically rearrange it, decreasing loading times and placing fewer problems on the computers processor. Defragmentation reduces data access and allows storage to be used more efficiently, some operating systems automatically defragment storage periodically, but others require  that the user occasionally use a special utility for this purpose. Drive formatting – formatting a hard drive enables it to be able to read and write data by creating a partition on the drive, a hard disk drive can be formatted or reformatted depending on what is being done to the drive. When a new hard drive is formatted a bootable partition is created, the partition that is created is where that operating system is installed. Formatting a hard drive requires selecting a file system that will be used on the drive, the file system is what the operating system uses to organize and allocate information that is written to various sectors on the hard disk. Formatting a hard disk will overwrite the data on the drive. The formatting process only removes the operating systems ability to read the data on the drive, data needs to be rewritten to the drive and then reformatted again to ensure that the data is no longer accessible. Registry cleaner – the purpose of a registry cleaner is to remove redundant items from the registry. A registry cleaner is designed for the use of Microsoft windows operating system. Registry cleaners have an automated procedure where it looks for invalid entries, missing file references or broken links within the registry and resolving or removing them. There are many registry cleaner programs you can download of the internet, some for free and some you have to purchase, for e.g. â€Å"CCleaner† is a registry cleaner program which is free and it works on windows 8, 7, vista and XP. CCleaner can be used to uninstall programs. It also allows changes of start-up programs, so users can disable start-up programs and CCleaner lets the user delete system restore points. Benchmarking – Benchmarking is basically running a computer program. Benchmark utilities are important in PC optimisation and troubleshooting. Benchmarking assesses the relative performance of an object, by running standard tests and trials against it. Benchmarking assesses the performance characteristics of computer hardware. There are full system benchmarks as well as those that only test certain parts of a system such as the memory, CPU function, hard drives and network connections. Benchmarks help find out if there is a problem and where the location is. Bibliography – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmark_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(computing) http://www.ladenterprizes.com/What_firewall.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_formatting http://danieleastcroftict.posterous.com/clean-up-tools-for-removal-of-cookies-and-int http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registry_cleaner