You know one thing I really love about Windows Vista? The integrated windows/microsoft update. The sad thing is though while its spectacular for keeping your OS and other microsoft related products up to date, it doesn’t support third party apps. This is something i’ve been dieing to have for windows ever since god knows when. The thing is even linux has a form of system wide updating (gentoo has portage for instance). The problem has always been though that with windows third party applications, theirs now central index of them, i mean lets face it theirs probably billions of applications for windows I mean just about every company develops windows apps the same is NOT true for linux.
Well apparently a group decided they could do it, they could maintain a database of the latest apps for windows (don’t ask me how they do it lol) and at the same time release a teeny tiny app to check for the updates across your entire computer. That program today is FileHippo UpdateChecker, I know cute name but not exactly what one would expect for such an amazing app. And especially an application that weights in at 108kb!
The program scans your computer, and then checks the installed program versions against it’s online database of program versions and then pops you onto a nice clean webpage to display all the programs in need of updates. Many of which it will even show you if new beta versions are available (something every tech geek like me loves).
How does it work? From what i can tell pretty darn good especially for a beta, it found about 3 updates on my computer and was easy enough to work with. Did it miss any updates? Well heres the funny part I realy don’t know because for me to go through and check all my apps webpages to see if theirs a new version would take me forever, and that in lies why this programs so wonderful of course :) So for now i’ll just keep trusting that it did find all the latest because even if its 80-90% accurate thats 75-85% better than i would have done :)
Source: FileHippo UpdateChecker
