Audit your PC, update your programs

SLOAN Ranger

Keeping software up to date is as difficult as keeping a closet of outfits up to fashion, except it's a lot less fun.

Today's Windows computers are complex things, particularly when it comes to software. Windows alone has more updates than a disco's playlist.

Then there are the programs. Security software needs constant updates to keep up with the crooks. But even ordinary programs - word processors, cleanup utilities and Internet browsers (especially Internet browsers, it seems) get out of date faster than rap songs, and in pretty well all cases it's up to you to (a) know that and (b) do something about it.

This is kind of what auditors do at inventory time each year.

It is tough to beat Belarc Advisor as an audit tool - in my opinion, impossible. In a minute or two, this impressive program shows you pretty well everything you should know about your personal computer, what is attached to it, and what is on it.

With a single mouse click to get it going, Belarc tells you all about your computer, the processor, the Windows versions and who logs in. It gives you information on your printers and monitors, which is interesting, and your bus adapters, controllers and iSCSI Initiator, which may not be so fascinating.

What we're discussing this week is installed software, and Belarc Advisor has full details. It catalogues every program that you can run. And it has a colour-coded scheme to tell you when you last used each program, a handy tool to pick out software you forgot about and don't need.

Belarc also has details on every Windows update you have downloaded and installed.

All of this information is presented neatly in a browser window. You can print it, save it, and it's all very useful in its way.

What it doesn't do is point you easily at what software is getting out of date and what you should do about that. You have a list of all your software, but not a big idea of what needs updating.

CNet, which runs download.com, used to promote a program called CatchUp.

The idea was that you logged into download.com and ran CatchUp on your machine. The software talked to download.com's database and told you what programs you had that were out of date.

CatchUp went belly up, and quite rightly. It was a ponderous, bug-ridden program that wasn't very useful - although on the other hand it wasted hours of users' lives that they will never get back.

TechTracker is a new program from download.com that is a lot like CatchUp in several ways. I've been involved in the beta-testing phase of TechTracker and, well...

You install this program on your PC, and it is supposed to run every time you start the computer.

As the machine boots up, it goes through the CatchUp-like talk with the master listing at download.com, then tells you what you need to do to bring your software up to date.

There is good news here. TechTracker is not nearly as full of bugs as CatchUp. The early versions of the program did not work all that well, but it is now a pretty smooth piece of software.

When it has talked to home base, TechTracker sits in your system tray and can show you a small-footprint list of your out-of-date software.

You have, automatically, a home page at download.com with more details on these programs and links to download, install and thus upgrade them.

The list seemed fairly inclusive. Familiar commercial programs like Google Chrome and Microsoft Word were on the list; as were freeware programs such as the fabulous VLC multimedia player and the all-in-one IM program Trillian.

That's about the end of the good news.

While it sounds good, TechTracker is still a work in progress - not in the software sense, but in the usefulness sense.

I couldn't just declare that, "hey, TechTracker finds out-of-date programs, it's great".

So I put it up against one of my favourite audit programs to see how it would fare. The news isn't great for CNet.

Software Updates Monitor (SUMo) is a fairly established program that I reviewed about a year and a half ago.

It operates a lot like TechTracker, except that it does not have the obviously huge resources of CNet and download.com.

Yet in a one-on-one test against the corporate, Big Software entry, SUMo easily won.

Where TechTracker found 43 programs to check and declared 19 out of date, SUMo found more than 120 programs and gave me links to update 32 of them.

Now this is not only about numbers. A good anti-virus program isn't the one that can find 10,000 viruses, it's the program that can kill the one virus on my computer.

TechTracker found updates for many of my most-used programs and only a few minor ones. SUMo, on the other hand, went through my program list with a fine-toothed comb, including programs that aren't actually installed and in the registry. Numbers can be misleading.

But frankly, in this case, SUMo didn't try to choose the "most important" programs that needed updating. It told me of all such programs it found, and then asked me what I wanted to do.

TechTracker is a good-looking, smooth-working program backed by what is probably the most popular and most frequently mentioned downloading site for freeware and shareware, as well as a sales site for commercial software, including Microsoft.

SUMo is from a small company, KC Softwares, in France. Not many people have heard of it.

But for now, I'm going to stick with SUMo to tell me what software seems to be going out of date.

SUMo is kept and explained at a modest website (http://www.kcsoftwares.com)

TechTracker is a new acquisition by CNet, now available for everyone at http://www.cnet.com/techtracker

The Belarc Advisor is an excellent tool, and is available at http://www.belarc.com

Email: wandasloan@gmail.com

Relate Search: Software Updates Monitor, Belarc Advisor, iSCSI Initiator