What is utility software? What is a device driver?

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

Аn computing, a device driver (commonly referred to simply as a driver) is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer.[1] A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details of the hardware being used.

A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device. Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface.

What is the operating system?

An operating system (OS) is the program that, after being initially loaded into the computer by a boot program, manages all the other programs in a computer. The other programs are called applications or application programs. The application programs make use of the operating system by making requests for services through a defined application program interface (API). In addition, users can interact directly with the operating system through a user interface such as a command line or a graphical user interface (GUI).

An operating system performs these services for applications:

In a multitasking operating system where multiple programs can be running at the same time, the operating system determines which applications should run in what order and how much time should be allowed for each application before giving another application a turn.

It manages the sharing of internal memory among multiple applications.

It handles input and output to and from attached hardware devices, such as hard disks, printers, and dial-up ports.

It sends messages to each application or interactive user (or to a system operator) about the status of operation and any errors that may have occurred.

It can offload the management of what are called batch jobs (for example, printing) so that the initiating application is freed from this work.

On computers that can provide parallel processing, an operating system can manage how to divide the program so that it runs on more than one processor at a time.

All major computer platforms (hardware and software) require and sometimes include an operating system, and operating systems must be developed with different features to meet the specific needs of various form factors.

Common desktop operating systems:

Windows is Microsoft’s flagship operating system, the de facto standard for home and business computers. Introduced in 1985, the GUI-based OS has been released in many versions since then. The user-friendly Windows 95 was largely responsible for the rapid development of personal computing.

Mac OS is the operating system for Apple’s Macintosh line of personal computers and workstations.

Linux is a Unix-like operating system that was designed to provide personal computer users a free or very low-cost alternative. Linux has a reputation as a very efficient and fast-performing system.

Windows operating systems have long dominated the market and continue to do so. As of August 2016, Windows systems had a market share of over 85 percent. In contrast, Mac OS was at a little over 6 percent and Linux was just over 2 percent. Nevertheless, Windows is losing market share from a long-held 90 percent and higher.

A mobile OS allows smartphones, tablet PCs and other mobile devices to run applications and programs. Mobile operating systems include Apple iOS, Google Android, BlackBerry OS and Windows 10 Mobile.

An embedded operating system is specialized for use in the computers built into larger systems, such as cars, traffic lights, digital televisions, ATMs, airplane controls, point of sale (POS) terminals, digital cameras, GPS navigation systems, elevators, digital media receivers and smart meters.

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Types of Utility Programs And Their Functions

Utility programs are used for the management of computer systems and also perform maintenance types tasks. Types of utility programs are available both as a part of operating systems like internet explorer and stand-alone form like VLC media player & google chrome.

Utility Program

A type of system software used to solve a particular problem of a user called a utility program. These are built-in into operating systems as well as available as stand-alone products like security suits. These are designed to help, analyze, configure, and maintain computer systems.

Types of Utility Programs

Many operating systems provide different types of utility programs to resolve common issues of software and hardware. Two types of utility programs are built-in (Disk scanner, Disk defragmenter, File viewer) and stand-alone utility (antivirus, Winzip, WinRAR, Google Chrome).

Best Apk Apps:

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

List of Utility Programs

• System Util i ties
• Storage Device Management Utilities
• File Management Utilities
• Miscellaneous Utilities

System Utilities

system utility is 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 you 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

An antivirus is 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 viruses. 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 do 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 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 others are later ports to other operating systems.

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

Package Managers

When you’re working on projects as quiet 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 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 up on 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 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 number 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 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 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 contain 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 the 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 for 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 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 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.

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