OPERATING SYSTEMS UTILITY PROGRAMS
The operating system (sometimes referred to by its abbreviation OS), is responsible for creating
the link between the material resources, the user and the applications (word processor, video
game, etc.). When a programme wants to access a material resource, it does not need to send
specific information to the peripheral device but it simply sends the information to the operating
system, which conveys it to the relevant peripheral via its driver. If there are no drivers, each
programme has to recognise and take into account the communication with each type of
peripheral!
The operating system thus allows the "dissociation" of programmes and hardware, mainly to
simplify resource management and offer the user a simplified Man-machine interface (MMI) to
overcome the complexity of the actual machine.
Utility:Utility software is a kind of system software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and
maintain the computer. A single piece of utility software is usually called a utility or tool.
Utility software should be contrasted with application software, which allows users to do things
like creating text documents, playing games, listening to music or surfing the web. Rather than
providing these kinds of user-oriented or output-oriented functionality, utility software usually
focuses on how the computer infrastructure (including the computer hardware, operating
system, application software and data storage) operates. Due to this focus, utilities are often
rather technical and targeted at people with an advanced level of computer knowledge.
Most utilities are highly specialized and designed to perform only a single task or a small range of
tasks. However, there are also some utility suites that combine several features in one piece of
software.

Utility Software Categories.
 Disk storage
 Disk fegramenters
 Disk checkers
 Disk cleaner
 Backup
 Antivirus
 Network utility
 Screensavers etc
File manger:A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to work
with file systems. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files are: create,
open, edit, view, print, play, rename, move, copy, delete, search/find, and modify attributes,
properties and permissions. Files are typically displayed in a hierarchy. Some file managers
contain features inspired by web browsers, including forward and back navigational
buttons.Some
file
managers
provide network connectivity
via protocols,
such
as FTP, NFS, SMB or WebDAV. This is achieved by allowing the user to browse for a file
server (connecting and accessing the server's file system like a local file system) or by providing
its own full client implementations for file server protocols.
Search utility:
"EVERYTHING" is a free search utility that will locate a file or folder by name located on any of
your hard drives in less than a second.

"Ho-hum" you say, "there are several programs that do that."

Quite so, but this one does it without creating massive indexes. That saves your disk space and
more importantly, doesn't slow down your PC by needing to maintain such indexes.

"But how can this work?" you ponder, "instant search utilities needs indexes in order to work."

Yes they do and that's the trick. with this product; it uses the indexes that form part of the NTFS
file system. It is using something that is already there rather than duplicating it.

It's a clever idea. Now why didn't somebody (including Microsoft) think of this before?

Of course to use EVERYTHING your hard drives need to be NTFS formatted but that includes
99.9% of all XP and Vista users, so it's hardly a limitation.

EVERTHING can scan multiple drives, find search terms embedded within file names and can be
accessed from a desktop shortcut, the Start Menu or from the right click context menu. It weighs
in at a massive 292KB download. Yes folks, that's kilobytes not megabytes. And its free.
Image viewer:
An image
viewer or image
browser is
a computer
program that
can
display
stored
graphical image; it can often handle various graphics file formats. Such software usually renders
the image according to properties of the display such as color depth, display resolution, and color
profile.

Although you may use a full-featured bitmap graphics editor (such as Photoshop or theGIMP) as
an image viewer, these have many editing functionalities which are not needed for just viewing
images, and therefore usually start rather slowly. Also, most viewers have functionalities that
editors usually lack, such as stepping through all the images in a directory (possibly as a
slideshow).

Image viewers give maximal flexibility to the user by providing a direct view of the directory
structure available on a hard disk. Most image viewers do not provide any kind of automatic
organization of pictures and therefore the burden remains on the user to create and maintain
their folder structure (using tag- or folder-based methods). However, some image viewers also
have features for organizing images, especially an image database, and hence can also be used
as image organizers.

Some image viewers, such as Windows Photo Viewer that comes with Windows operating
systems, change a jpeg image if it is rotated, resulting in loss of image quality; others offer
losseless rotation.
Typical features of image viewers are:
o
fullscreen display
o
slideshow
o
thumbnail display
o
printing
o
screen capture
Common image viewers include:
o Windows
o Windows Explorer - file manager with basic built-in functionality for image viewing
o Windows Picture and Fax Viewer
o ACDSee, XnView, IrfanView, FastStone Image Viewer, FastPictureViewer, Imagine
Personal firewall:
A personal firewall is an application which controls network traffic to and from a computer,
permitting or denying communications based on a security policy.

A personal firewall differs from a conventional firewall in terms of scale. Personal firewalls are
typically designed for use by end-users. As a result, a personal firewall will usually protect only
the computer on which it is installed.

Many personal firewalls are able to control network traffic by prompting the user each time a
connection is attempted and adapting security policy accordingly. Personal firewalls may also
provide some level of intrusion detection, allowing the software to terminate or block connectivity
where it suspects an intrusion is being attempted.
Common personal firewall features:
o
Alert the user about outgoing connection attempts
o
Allows the user to control which programs can and cannot access the local
networkand/or Internet
o
Hide the computer from port scans by not responding to unsolicited network traffic
o
Monitor applications that are listening for incoming connections
o
Monitor and regulate all incoming and outgoing Internet users
o
Prevent unwanted network traffic from locally installed applications
o
Provide the user with information about an application that makes a connection attempt
o
Provide information about the destination server with which an application is attempting to
communicate
Disk Scanner:
SCANDISK or ScanDisk is a utility in MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows systems which checks
and repairs file systems and bad clusters on the hard drive. It was introduced in MS-DOS
version 6.2. Previous versions of MS-DOS supplied only the simpler, purely text-based
programCHKDSK.

ScanDisk included a more user-friendly interface than MS-DOS CHKDSK, more command-line
and other configuration options, and the ability to detect and sometimes recover from physical
errors on the disk. Unlike CHKDSK, ScanDisk would also repair crosslinked files.

In Windows 95 onwards, SCANDISK also had a graphical user interface, although the text
interface continued to be available for use in single-tasking ("DOS") mode. SCANDISK can't
check NTFS disk drives and therefore isn't available for computers runningNT
based (including Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc.) versions of Windows: a newerCHKDSK is
provided instead (not to be confused with the older MS-DOS CHKDSK).

On Unix-like systems there are tools like "fsck_msdosfs" to do the same task.
Disk Defragmenter:Disk Defragmenter is a utility inMicrosoft Windows designed to increase access speed by
rearranging files stored on a disk to occupy contiguous storage locations, a technique
calleddefragmentation. Defragmenting a disk minimizes head travel, which reduces the time it
takes to read files from and write files to the disk. Beginning with Windows XP, Disk
Defragmenter also reduces system startup times..
Backup utility:Backup software are computer programs used to perform backup; they create supplementary
exact copies of files, databases or entire computers. These programs may later use the
supplementary copies to restore the original contents in the event of data loss