Utility programs are designed
to do just one or two tasks
Utility software interacts with
the computers hardware E.g.
the Disk Drive
Utility programs can be stand
alone but are also inbuilt in to
the Operating System
Utility software
File Compression Disk
Defragmentation File
Repair Disk Copying
Disk Formatting Disk
Backup / Restore
Anti-Virus
Encryption
Encryption means to scramble data in a way that it
is unreadable to anybody who doesn’t have a key to
be able to unscramble this. Data is encrypted using
a key and then decrypted using a key Data is
encrypted so that it is unreadable if anyone is to
intercept it
Back-ups
Ensures that if computers are
stolen or damaged in for e.g. a
fire or a natural disaster that
data can be restored and a
company do not lose much
money
Full
A copy of all data and software on the hard
disk drive / server is copied to a backup
medium (e.g. an external hard disk drive /
DVD-R) and the medium is kept at a different
location Take a long time to complete (usually
overnight) Recovery takes a long time as it
restores all data and programs
Incremental
A full backup is made initially Each night only
the files which have been changed since the
last incremental back-up are copied Much
faster to complete that full back-ups Takes
much longer at restoring than a Full Back up
as the full back up would need restoring first
and then every incremental back-up since
the last full back up
Operating Software
Utility Programs
Disk Defragmentation
tool, anti-virus software,
disk copier/ formatter,
data compression
User managment
Peripheral managment
When a peripheral is
required, a signal, called an
interrupt, is generated to
signal to the operating
system that it needs to deal
with something. This tells the
CPU to stop the running
process as soon as it can and
to deal with another process
linked to the peripheral
device. These programs are
called device drivers.
Memory managment
When a program is running it
must be in the computer’s
main memory and the
operating system must
manage where in memory
each program and the data it
needs must go.
Multi-tasking
While the CPU waits for other
actions to complete, e.g. loading
data to RAM, it works on other
tasks