Software Utilities

Viruses and Reasons why we need software utilities?

Malware

Malware is an example of a virus and is harmful software which adds something harmful to a computer. The virus is spread by the human actions in which the user does such as receiving an email and downloading this onto the computer or inputting a USB which has harmful software on which will then go into the computer.

How does this affect the performance of the computer?

This will affect the computers performance by making the computer run slowly and make the computer always need to be rebooted.

Worms

These try to spread themselves unlike viruses and aren’t started by human actions as they are able to spread their selves through the computer without the user’s interaction.

How does this affect the performance of the computer?

This like malware can also slow computer performance sown which and can be protected more by Norton or Firefox which can block pop ups and disable viruses to the computer and internet which is where most of the worms spread.

Trojan

These are legit functions with hidden unwanted functions within them; for example to download a game which enables you to play however it also will make another user able to see your files and view bank details to steal.

How does this affect the performance of the computer?

 The Trojan is able to cause damage and could erase the hard disk drive from your computer, this is able to copy itself automatically and disguises itself as something it’s not. It is usually found in games, programs or documents and can therefore be dangerous to your computer if you didn’t know it was there.

Polymorphic viruses

This is the spreading virus which would constantly change so it is disguised as its spreading throughout the computer.  The virus checks would look at the codes to see if there is anything harmful or suspicious which could happen within the computer however running this scan degrades the performance of the computer but it is less harmful than a virus could be.

How does this affect the performance of the computer?

This can corrupt data which will have an impact on the performance of the computer which makes it slower and less reliable as viruses are loaded onto files and set of when the file is opened which with most you are unaware of the virus until it impacts the performance.

Fragmentation

Overtime data gets stored into different parts of the disk. The process of looking at data on the disk to make sure there in continuous blocks or sectors.

How will this affect the performance of the computer?

This would help to make sure that the computer is running smoothly and that each piece of data has its own sector by using disk defragmentation. File fragmentation is when files are scattered throughout the computer hard drive rather than being in continuous blocks or in one location. This is caused when gaps are left in the hard drive and is why it is important to use software utilities to help prevent this.