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'

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.