Security of your PC is down to more than just having an Anti-Virus and/or firewall to protect it.
It’s more than ensuring you follow security best practices – see here or here.
It’s more than not clicking random links sent to you by your mates.
It’s more than running WindowsUpdate on a regular basis – for the record I don’t have it set to auto update.
It also includes ensuring your application software is up to date.
But how do you do that?
Well let me introduce you to the wonderful world of patch management software and in particular my favourite tool of choice – Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector).
PSI is, yet another app, that is best left running all the time. Initially it scans your PC (mainly for exe, .dll, and .ocx files) and then consults its own database of software signatures. Once this is done it is able to identify the version of software running and advise on whether it is out of date or has a vulnerability. The choice still remains yours to update or not but again PSI makes it relatively easy to do this by providing links to the discussion, the updates etc.
Best of all it’s free to home users.
It has a small system footprint and I can see no sensible reason why you wouldn’t run it or similar software – Secunia even has an online version (OSI not surprisingly) now but this is limited in the extent of its coverage – see here for a comparison chart. Naturally the online one doesn’t cover as much ground as PSI but is good for a quick check without installing anything.
That said – I’ve run PSI for years now and whilst there are other products I have yet to see one match PSI’s simplicity and ease of use. It even comes with a basic or advance usage for the nerds amongst us.
