So you’re an update freak, aren’t you? Always checking you have the latest version of each single piece of software you installed on your Windows PC. Yes, Windows, since if you had Linux you just had to update your repositories to always get the latest updates (ok, it’s not always true: if you installed by hand something which wasn’t in the repositories you’d have to check by yourself, but it’s just a minority of software…).
Anyway, let’s go back to your Windows PC. To be sure you always have the latest versions of each installed software you have a few options:

1. rely on the integrated update checker (but some applications lack this feature);
2. periodically visit the producer’s Web site to check for updates;
3. use some update checker solution…

And here come to help you a host of free programs promising to do the hard work for you. These programs come in different flavors: some of them will try to keep a list of all of the software installed on your system and automatically check online for updates without any (or with little) user intervention. The idea is nice, but this approach leads to some problems: sometimes the program won’t be able to fully list the software installed in your system, sometimes you will get false positives (software erroneously reported as updated). Another approach looks less error prone, but asks for more work from the user: the latter kind of programs just looks for updates in a web page (or in a user defined part of it) and warns the user about every update it finds. So if you are willing to go through the tedious process of manually defining all the Web pages to check, you can be sure to be always notified when there is a change.
Below you’ll find an incomplete list of the two kinds of update checker applications:

Automatic updaters:

1. AppSnap;
2. Appupdater;
3. FileHippo Update Checker;
4. Secunia Personal Software Inspector (this one is mostly geared towards finding security related updates);
5. SUMo Software Updates Monitor;
6. UpdateStar;

Web page update checkers:

1. Ketarin;
2. WebMon.

I won’t go through the full process of testing  all of these applications, but if you google a little you’ll find some interesting reviews/comparisons of most of these applications.

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