Being quite the bloke who loves to keep his system up-to-date with the latest patches and one who's always on the lookout for innovative new software to perform daily tasks quicker and easier, I've a gazillion software installed on my computer. As you can imagine, maintaining the software by keeping it up-to-date is a gigantic task in itself.

It's said, "Acquisition of something is much easier than time spent maintaining it" ; therefore the ancient wisdom "Less is more". It seems I'm yet to learn from the ancient wisdom. This situation is further aggravated by me working for tech magazines to write about software. Therefore I'm always on the lookout to make the job of updating my software much easier and thus begun the quest, which in turn led to this article.

True, most software today are designed to take advantage of automatic updates built-in (such as anti-virus programs), but not all. Even if they are, there is no direct way of recognizing how many updates or to get a clear picture regarding the software situation at-a-glance; this is where specialized software updaters/trackers come in.

Me being a big lover of free software (who isn't), I wanted to check out free software updaters. Honestly I find it strange why anyone would want to charge for a service like this, take CNET VersionTracker as an example, download.com is free service, CNET (the parent company) earns enough through ads and content syndication, then why charge for this? Make it ad supported at the very least. But I'm in no position to know their business strategies, so let's not get into that, but it does make one wonder.


FileHippo

Website - http://www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/

This little fat hippo has grown to be one of my favourites and I'll tell you why. FileHippo is one of the few free applications that is crystal clear in its offering without any strings attached. The simplicity is what you'll love in this application.

However, the app is a little too simple as of now. The wonderful little application is limited to what filehipppo.com offers, which isn't as big a repository as download.com is. Its scans are quick and provide a list of programs that are updateable, as a sweet bonus, you can also download the older versions of programs from the quick list provided which I thought was a nice touch. For those who know how new updates can break some software, you'll understand the relevance of this.