We’ve previously raved about the excellent Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI). It provides up-to-date information on over 5,500 applications, and since the Beta stage back in July 2007 they have revamped the interface to make it more user friendly.
This is the first Release Candidate of Secunia PSI, and I have to say that they are providing an incredible service at no cost. The new version, in addition the the updated interface, will let you track how well you’ve been keeping up with patches from week to week.
Some of you might be familiar with the web-based Secunia Software Inspector, and are probably wondering why it’s worth installing this program. As I mentioned earlier the Secunia PSI is able to monitor over 5,500 apps for updates, but the web-based version only checks 40 different programs. Naturally you can see the benefit of using the application.
Now it’s time for you to join the 200,000+ users that are already using Secunia PSI, which has monitored over 16 million programs. It can run discretely in your Windows System Tray, and only notifies you when your attention is needed. Looks like it is time to get your computer up-to-date!
Secunia PSI (Windows 2000/XP SP2/2003/Vista)
Thanks for the tip “S”!
Secunia is great, but be aware that it is a patch monitor and not a software monitor. In other words, it monitors for patches in case some software you’ve installed has vulnerability issues. It does not mention any updates for software that have no vulnerability issues, even if such updates are available.
Another thing is that keeping it running on your computer might take more of your PC’s memory than you’re willing to accept. My advice is to check the task manager and see how much memory PSI is using and determine if you can live with it (it can be over 100MB of memory).