If you've ever wondered, "what is utility software?", we have the answer. We often think about the cool things computers can do—playing movies and music, gaming, digital design and searching the Web. Few people get excited about utility software, and most of us don’t even think about it until our computers stop doing the cool things we want them to do. With memory-hungry programs and Web hazards attacking your hard drive, a complete suite of utility software is a must to keep your computer running at its best.

What is Utility Software: The Essentials
Disk Defragmenters—Microsoft includes this utility software with the XP and Vista operating systems, but if these don't address your needs, third-party software companies such as Raxco produce robust defragmenting programs that help you better manage your available disk space. Mac users seldom need to defragment, because the Mac OS prefers writing continuous files to the fragmented files preferred by Windows. If your Mac’s hard drive is more than 95% full and you’re working with large files, fragmenting can occur, so you might want to run defragmenting utility software.

Registry Cleaners—A computer's registry contains information and commands called keys that essentially tell the computer what to do in certain situations. Each time you add or remove software, you make changes to your computer's registry, which grows larger over time.

Even when you use the Windows Add or Remove Programs option to delete old programs, you may leave behind some empty registry keys that just take up space. With all this registry clutter and wasted space, your computer's performance will most likely suffer.

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