I got an email from a reader in Mt. Crawford over a month ago asking an excellent question. They wanted to know if there was a way to keep all of their programs up to date, keeping the latest version always on their system.
In talking back and forth with them we came to the conclusion that there should be something on the market that was similar to “Windows Update”. WU comes with all versions of Microsoft windows as all of my readers should know. It allows you to check and see if there are any new versions of your MS products that need updating. If there are, it allows you to update them so that you can stay ahead of the curve.
After a little Googling and searching I found a program called Secunia-PSI. I have no idea what “Secunia” means but PSI is for “Personal Software Inspector”. This program does almost everything the reader wanted. I have been testing it for a little over a month and it seems to work very well.
You can go to secunia.com to read about and download the personal edition of the application. There are actually three different versions of Secunia. They are OSI (Online), PSI (Personal) and CSI (Corporate). I tried the OSI and it was adequate but does not look for as many programs as the PSI and CSI versions. The CSI version is really for the corporate environment and home users do not need it. All three are here: bit.ly/bx3f5u.
All versions are free but I recommend downloading/installing the PSI version which seems to be very thorough. You will find it in the middle of the three on the page recommended above.
The default setting for Secunia runs in the background all the time checking your computer’s software for updates. I leave it like that on my desktop since I have loads of memory. However, for my netbook I just run it once a week or so.
I pride myself in always keeping all of my software up to date, so let’s take a look at how my three computers faired after being scanned by Secunia.
My netbook scored 100% as all of my software was up-to-date, yeah!
My notebook didn’t do as well. There were four applications that weren’t up to standards. But I still did better than 15% of users in Virginia; Secunia gives you this info if you register the product. (free)
Now my pride and joy, my desktop computer…oops, I had 11 applications that were not where they should be. I spent about an hour uninstalling some old versions which Secunia advised me to do, before I updated them. I also downloaded some of the new versions from the links provided by Secunia. And I learned a valuable lesson, as the bible says, “Pride goes before destruction.”
Now, let’s look at a couple of drawbacks. It indicated that all three browsers on my system were insecure and needed updates. They are MSIE, Firefox and Google Chrome. Come on, give me a break! They were all updated and as secure as possible. I guess it wanted me to uninstall all three of them. Of course, then my surfing the net time would be cut down considerably. I decided to ignore those threats. You can always make rules to ignore certain warnings.
