Introduction
Are you new to computers, or are you just getting the hang of things with computers when someone tells you that you need to go get some computer software and you are looking at the person all confused? Don’t worry; we’ve all been at this point, and we are here to help.
What is computer software?
Computer software isn’t something physical, like the hardware in our computer, it is a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do. It allows us to do certain task on a computer. There are loads of programs out there. There are too many to count, in fact.
Paint Example
Let’s take the Paint program, for example, Paint allows us to create or edit pictures. Paint can also be used to make logos as well as crop, resize, and add text to our pictures. This is just one example of a computer program.
This is just one of example of what a computer programs can help us achieve. Some other examples of computer software are listed below:
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- Nero: used for burning DVDs or CD’s (The good old days where you sat and watched and waited patiently for it to reach 100% and hoped the message of Burning processing failed doesn’t show up, or at least I did)
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- Media players: VLC, Windows media player for watching your DVDs or listening to music from your CD’s.
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- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) is the most widely used software that is used to type letters, create spreadsheets, and lastly PowerPoint is used to make presentations, Microsoft office is widely used and is the preferred choice when it come to typing letters, doing spreadsheets and also for creating presentations.
Photoshop: Photoshop is an incredible application and is the most popular photo editing program out there. It does have a learning curve to it, but don’t let this stop you, but once you have mastered that there no stopping what you can do with this application.
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Adobe Premier pro: Is used for editing videos, it is used by a vast array of people from home users all the way to professions. It is a very popular video editing tool, and you can do virtually anything with it. It does have a learning curve which can be overwhelming but stick with it and you will see the video editors potential.
Types of software
There are two types of software and we categorise them as system software and application software.
| System software | Application Software |
| Operating system (O/S) E.g., Windows, Mac and Linux |
General: Excel, Power Director |
| Language Processor and device driver. | Custom-built software for companies (mainly for businesses) |
System
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- Operating systems: also known as O/S, When we first switch on a computer, the first computer software that is loaded is the operating system, e.g., Microsoft Windows. Windows lets us control all of our hardware: RAM (also called memory), CPU (the brain of the computer), storage (hard drives), and printers. It also gives the user an interface (GUI, Graphical User Interface). which helps us control the computer.
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- Language Processor: when we use a computer and we click print for example, we can read the word print but the computer would not read the word print. This is where the language processor comes in and converts our human-readable language into computer language; this can also be done vice versa.
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- Device driver: a device driver allows the O/S to control the device.e.g., a hard drive, a flash drive. Every device will come with a driver as soon as you plug it in. a flash drive for example, windows will try to install this driver; if it can’t install the driver, you will have to go to the manufacturer’s website and download the driver. Without the driver, the device won’t work, so its quite important that you get the driver.
Application software
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- Application software : is software that provides the end user (you) with special features that you can’t do directly from your computer . So let’s take Excel, for example. With Excel, we can build databases and use it for accounting etc. If we didn’t have the Excel program, we wouldn’t be able to do this on our computer alone.
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- Custom-built program: this is computer software that has been designed for a very specific task and may only be accessible to the company that paid for it.
Why do we need software?
The reason we have computer software is that it allows computers to do specific tasks that would be impossible for us to do on our own. Let’s take our computer with Windows on it. If we wanted to watch a video it’s not always possible to use windows media player (this comes with windows) and it may require you to download another application such as VLC for example.
Conclusion
Computer software is vital for us to do everyday activities on our computers, such as watching movies, typing up letters, and burning DVDs’. There is a lot of applications out there that can help us do a wide array of tasks. I hope you have a better understanding of why software is important for us as end users.