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