What is a Utility Program and How Can It Help You?

Utility Programs are a type of software that helps to maintain or configure a computer. it's no system software a bit like an operating system, but they're extra types of programs that are installed at the same time. 

as the OS sometimes but they can also be added afterward and then just for making sure the computer is running as best it possibly can life focusing more on the hardware so and some examples are antivirus software. 

so that's trying to make sure you don't get viruses with all your incoming data encryption and decryption so making sure. so no prying eyes can understand your data click keeping your system clean. so it runs as best possible ensuring everything's up to date with software updates. 

These are all examples I'm going to focus on this one disk Defragmenter defragmentation so you could have to talk about one. so I say antivirus firewall things like that are quite nice examples that are easy to talk about. 

However, I quite like this defragmentation because it's one that it's got a really long name and once you understand it's actually quite basic what it's doing so it's focused on one in case you get asked to talk about one in the exam in more detail. 

what disk defragmentation does and is essential when you store things on the computer so let's say I'm just storing these blue bits of data here all right you'll start storing on a track of information so you start storing in. 

let's say these blocks of bytes of data but then what happens is you might run out of room in that one and then you have to go and put something over here and then over here on the hard drive, what you might find is your and sort of data gets segmented all over the hard drive. 

So all disk defragmentation does is try to reorganize it in blocks or all the data is together not only does this get rid of these tiny blocks of data that are left like a tiny little gap. I left the waiver as things get deleted things like that and it also so that potentially frees up some room. 

Also will speed up file access if you imagine this was let's say it's a hard disk drive magnetic if you imagine, it's spinning and I'm trying to read that line of data that's quite easy if it's all in line for me to read and quite fast 

If I've got them to move over here and then move over there that's going to mean there's more movement going on there's gonna take longer to read okay so it can speed or file access but it also can free up some displace. 

The reason it happens is over time imagine I've got these files that are nicely organized let's say I'd delete the green file and then I delete that pink file well eventually when this starts filling up my free space is then in the middle of other files. 

I'll stop putting new files in these gaps and then some of the other things will get late and then the gaps produced so you can see how over time gaps start to emerge and then you start filling those gaps and/or the gaps emerge. 

It ends up like that so every now and again it's worth running disk defragmentation software that's built into your operating systems to try and tidy up and you might find your computer starts running quicker