5 Free Excellent Tools To Help Keep Your Software Up To Date

No body likes to compromise on their system’s security. Most of the PC users use some good antivirus software's and Firewalls to keep their PC secure. Moreover many of us update the antivirus software's regularly too. But is that enough to keep our PC secure? If you think Yes then its not. Think about the software's installed in our PC. These days there is a growing trend that hackers exploit the loop holes present in popular programs such as Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash Player etc (There are many). These are the programs which are commonly installed or mostly found in almost any PC. So they take advantage of the loop holes in these programs to devise an attack. So keeping note of this most of the software manufacturers release some hot fixes or patches regularly to close these loop holes. Downloading them for each software we use is some difficult task. Most of us wont spend time to download and install these updates. Due to the annoyance we mostly turn off the automatic update option in the programs. So here are 5 Excellent Freeware Programs to keep your software's automatically up to date.

1) Personal Software Inspector

Personal Software Inspector has an online database of 4000 programs. Personal Software Inspector is developed by the famous Secunia software company. The elementary function of Personal Software Inspector is to load the critical Patches in popular programs. Personal Software Inspector has a great advantage that it will do an in-depth scan on the Hard Disk for DLL and EXE files and compares the version information in them with its online database and informs which all programs has a new update available. A wizard will help the user to update the program. What we need to do is only click the link provided by it. Personal Software Inspector boasts a nice and user friendly interface.

Download Personal Software Inspector

2) SUMo

In this category of softwares SUMo tops in the first place when it comes to application recognition range. SUMo can detect almost all the software installed on our PC. SUMo has an online database of about 90,000 most used programs and this is the only key to the programs top position. SUMo checks the program version installed on our system with this online database to keep track of any available updates for it.

SUMo’s features includes the ability to start the program along with windows, scan speeds, turn off checking for Microsoft programs etc.

But there is some thing about SUMo that we don’t like to hear. SUMo is not for you if your are looking for a program that will automatically download these updates by itself without the users interaction. Sumo presents the programs for which an update is available. When we click on the update option then SUMo guides to its website where a collection of statistics about which version is used by how many users is presented. The user needs to manually search for the updated version in popular software download sites such as Softpedia, Google, MajorGeeks etc.

To exclusively check for a particular programs update you just need to drag and drop the programs EXE file into SUMo’s Window.

Download SUMo

3) Software-UpToDate

Software-UpToDate takes the information from the Windows Installer of an Application to check its version. But for certain programs this case don’t work so it dives into the windows registry to search for the programs entered in the system control. Software-UpToDate also makes use of an online database to compare the version of the programs installed in our system. This database is updated regularly.

The bad news about Software-UpToDate is that it wont give the direct link to download the program updates. Some times it will detect the manufacturer of the software.

Download Software-UpToDate

4) UpdateStar

Apart from the above mentioned programs UpdateStar is very special due to it neat and user friendly interface and the ability to give direct download links for the updates. This make UpdateStar really a handy application. UpdateStar currently hold a online data base of over 80,000 programs. What it lacks is that the inability to do a through system registry scan. Thus less detection rate. It detects the programs which are registered in the system control software directory. But despite of this limitation UpdateStar will make our job easier by giving the update’s download links. This will really save some time since we don't want to search for the updates separately. UpdateStar comes with a ribbon style interface as we see in Microsoft Office 2007.


Download UpdateStar

5) Update Checker

What you look for is the latest updates for most widely used applications then, Update Checker will help you. Update Checker is from FileHippo.com. The program detects the updates for the 200 programs hosted at FileHippo.com. This includes most popular programs including freeware applications like Winamp, Adobe Reader, IrfanView, CCleaner etc. . You can include additional directories to scan for from the settings option > Custom locations > Add.  After the program starts up it scans for installed applications and leads the user to a website where the updates available for the  installed programs are presented in a ordered way. Moreover Update Checker will give you the  direct download links.

Download Update Checker

Looking forward for your suggestions about new softwares like these.