How can software utilities improve the performance of computer systems

Software Utilities help to improve the perfromance of your computer by helping to optimize it. There are a number of different utilities that are provided with the basic operating system, these are:

Disk Check

By running the disk check, it scans the main hard disk and check for any errors that may have occured due to a power outage for example. This improves performance because it is cleaning any errors that may have occured, and is allowing the computer to pick up files that may have been corrupted.

Disk Defragment

The disk defragmenter essentially put files that are stored in different parts of the hard disk back together, thus freeing disk space while speeding up your computer, as what power it was using to find and put the files back together when opening them is now not being used.

Web page cleaner

Often, when you are surfing the web, the computer saves the browsing history to the main disk, this results in slowing the computer down whenever you start up internet explorer, as it is loading all of the previous history, by running this utility, you are removing all of the history that is one week or older, thus there is less history to load, and internet explorer will load quicker.

Temporary file cleaner

When you are looking at web pages, or even working on files in microsoft office, the computer can store temporary files, these could be pasted images, and cookies on the internet. By running the disk cleanup, you can remove these temporary files, and cause the speed of your computer to increase.

Windows Update

Windows Update is normally used to install critical updates, but if you set it to install all updates, and to do it automatically, it can install updates that actually increase the computers speed. This is because they are normally low priority updates, and are not normally installed.

Software Utilities

Software Utilities are programs that help you to maintain a computer. they are normally shipped with the operating system , and can help to optimize the system. There come in a variety of forms, such as clean up and disk defragment tools.

Disk defragment tools

Occasionally, your computer's hard disk will become fragmented, which is when files that have been there that the user has deleted, and has saved new files in it's place, but if the file is bigger than the file that was previously deleted, then the computer will fragment that file, and place it in available empty slots on the hard disk. The disk defragmenter will consolidate those fragmented files and put them next to their counterparts while at the same time freeing up disk space.

To run the disk defragment, you go to

START-> Control Panel->System and Security-> Defragment your hard drive

Once in, you either analyze or defragment the disk, if you select defragment, the computer will automatically analyze the hard disk before defragmenting.




This is the analysis screen for the disk defragmenter, it is showing in the top bar what the fragmentation state would be before defragmentation

 After this the user has the option to defragment or view the report, if the user chooses to defragment, the following screen will appear




In this screen the top bar remains the same as defined in the top screenshot, while the bottom bar shows what the disk will look like after defragmentation.

 After the defragmentation the defragmentation report will come up.



This screenshot shows the defragmentation report, which gives details of the performed defragmentation



System Clean Up

This software utility is used to clean up disks of files that are not nessecary and just take up disk space. To run this utility the user must

START->CONTROL PANEL->SYSTEM AND SECURITY-> FREE UP DISK SPACE

This utility will first scan to see how much space you can gain,



This is a screenshot showing the clean up utility scanning and calculating how much space I can gain


and you can select what type of files are to be deleted using the checkboxes at the side of the program



This is a screen of what happens after the utility has scanned, as you can see, the amount of space you will save is displayed to the right of the item with the total amount gained is displayed underneath


When you select the "ok" button, the following screen will appear



This screenshot shows that the utility is deleting the files types that i selected in the second screenshot