unit 2 - D1

Expand on your notes for Task 3 explaining the purpose of different software utilities to explain how each can improve the performance of a computer system. You need to cover:

Security virus protection and/or firewalls

Having security virus protection on your computer can improve the performance of a computer system because it detects, prevents, and takes action to remove malicious software programs, such as viruses and worms.  A lot of people use programmes such as Microsoft security essentials to help protect their computer against viruses. Computer viruses are software programs that are designed to interfere with computer operation; record, corrupt, or delete data; they also spread themselves to other computers and throughout the Internet. To help prevent the most current viruses, it’s helpful to update the antivirus software regularly. You can set up most types of antivirus software so that they update automatically, so this helps the user because it will automatically stop any viruses coming through.

Clean up tools for removal of cookies and/or internet history and/or defragmentation

Clean up tools help the performance of a computer system because they clear up a lot of unnecessary data that is slowing the computer down. For example, when the user has so much history building up and uses so many cookies to make the internet work better, it will slow the computer down because it has to deal with all that data as well as all of the stuff that the user is using. So having clean up tools will remove all of the internet history and cookies, and this will make the computer run a lot more quicker and smoother, without any lagging because the computer just has to deal with the stuff that the user is using, and not all of the history and cookies that the user would have had on the computer before.

 Drive formatting

Drive formatting helps the performance of the computer system because when a computer's hard drive is formatted, all of the data on the disk is completely erased and a fresh copy of the system's operating system is reinstalled. Even after all of the operating system files have been copied on to the formatted drive, there will be a larger amount of free space on the hard drive. Computers run faster and more efficiently when there is more room on the hard drive, so formatting the drive can increase the computer's performance in terms of data storage.

After a few years of using the computer, different files that run the operating system can become corrupted, which can slow down many functions of the computer. Hard drive utility applications can sometimes clean and repair these files, but the easiest way to boost performance is to do a complete format of the hard drive and reinstall all necessary files, returning them to their uncorrupted state, so this makes drive formatting very important to the computer because it is very easy to turn the computer from slow to fast, without losing any work.