5. Utility Programs

A Utility program is designed to do one or perhaps two tasks very well and nothing else.

For example, you may want to compress a file to let you save it on to a flash drive. For this task you would choose to use a file compression utility program.

Quite often, a Utility program is built right in to the operating system. For example Windows has a built in 'Zip' compression utility you can use to compress a file or folder.

(In Windows Explorer Right Click over the file so a menu pops up, then select "Send To" and you should see "Compressed (zipped) folder" as an option)

NOTE: in your exam, you must refer to the term 'compression' rather than 'zipped'

utility programs

Here are some very common tasks that are carried out by various Utility programs

  • File sorting
  • File renaming
  • File conversion (e.g. convert a sound file to MP3)
  • File repair
  • Disk monitoring and defragmentation (defragging)
  • Printing jobs
  • Backing up data.
  • Anti-Virus

Note that a utility program only does one or perhaps two of these.

The picture below shows some very handy utility programmes you can download from the internet.

utility programs

 

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Utility Programs

 

 

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