How Software Utilities can Improve Performance

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Software utilities can help to improve the performance of a computer system in a variety of ways, without software utilities, a computers performance could be affected. For example a computer without security such as virus protects will be much more prone to getting attacked by viruses which could corrupt data on the computer, and will defiantly decrease the speed of a computer system. In some cases, it may be able to steal stored data and information; therefore it is important to use as many software utilities as possible to prevent these kinds of things from happening and to improve the general performance of a computer system.

Software utility	How can it improve computer performance?	Improvements that can be made to the utility
Anti-virus	Anti-virus software is very important in order to keep your computer secure and to a high performance. Viruses can cause real harm to a computer such as removing or destroying vital data, slowing down a computer or shutting down a computer. Anti-virus software’s are used identify potential threats to a computer system and block them; however some viruses encrypt themselves to be different every time, making it impossible to detect.	Anti-virus software’s should be made to identify and stop all viruses from harming a computer system. They also should have automatic updates which do not have to be scheduled so that when you are not on a computer, constant updates should occur to remove all potential threats to a computer system.
Firewalls	A firewall is another form of security that can be added onto a computer. Firewalls act as a barrier to keep destructive elements out of a network or a specific computer. They are configured to block or prevent unauthorised access to a network. They work as filters for your network traffic by blocking incoming packets of information that are seen as unsafe. .  it is very important therefore to make sure that you’ve got protection from the kind of things like malicious software	A firewall can only protect against that for which it is designed for. Unfortunately it is impossible to predict all of the potential bugs other software may have. In addition, there are a large number of situations where a firewall quite simply cannot provide protection since not all communication passes through it. If there was a way to make sure all communication was passed through the firewall, then it would be able to block all harmful software.
Removal of cookies	While cookie files are quite small, they can still build up and slow down your system performance. When too many cookies accumulate, those unneeded files can bog down the system and result in it running more slowly than it should. It is important to take the time to delete the cookies to increase the speed and performance of your web browsing software.	Instead of having to manually delete the cookies, there should be a way to set a schedule of when the cookies are removed from the browser (maybe once per month) and the cookies from what files you want deleted. This way you can remove the unnecessary cookies without having to take the time to do it
Internet history	Removing all internet history will increase the general performance of a computer; it will be able to run faster because there is less data stored on to the system. It is also useful to do this if you are on a public computer as you can remove all information related to you from the system. This can be especially important if the information is bank details.	Similar to cookies, if there was a way to automatically have history deleted at scheduled times then there will be less information saved, hence enabling the computer system to run faster than before. This could be done by deleting everything in the history at any one time or only specified websites and files that you have programmed the system to do.
Defragmentation	Fragmentation makes your hard disk do extra work that can slow down your computer. Disk defragmentation rearranges fragmented data so your hard disk can work more efficiently. Disk defragmenter runs on a schedule but you can also defragment your hard disk manually or change the times in which it does this. It puts files that have been fragmented back together so that they can be read faster.	Defragmentation software’s should be able to collect all of the relevant files and put them back together all at one time, rather than doing in in scheduled cycles. This way it can be done quicker and in a shorter space of time. It can also be done at less concern for the user as it is done itself.
Drive formatting	Over time a computer’s hard drive may experience malfunctions due to wear and tear, viruses, or other programs that bog down the pc. To maintain and resolve performance issues, reformatting the hard drive annually is advisable. After formatting a hard drive and reinstalling the operating system, software program conflicts or glitches should disappear, and the computer’s performance will improve to a large extent.	When drive formatting, it is important to ensure that all important data is backed up on some type of external hard drive as there I a good chance of it getting lost if the data somehow gets removed from the drive with no kind of backup. I think to improve this; there should be some kind of guide of suggestions of things to do before drive formatting to ensure everything that needs to be kept on a system can be kept on a system. It may be a good idea to include external hardware within this guide to make things easier for users.