I have covered freeware software updaters before In my Software Updaters roundup. In this post I believed Filehippo’s updater and Sumo were very good. Here we have another application updater and it compares rather well with those I have covered before.
Updating Software
After launching the app and waiting a little while (as it scanned install locations) software informer found 180 applications I have installed on my laptop. This figure is good compared with FileHippo’s Update Checker which found 38 programs with 19 updates. Software Informer also found (as you can see from the screenshot) that 69 of my applications were out of date. As I have stressed before it is important to update to the latest version of a program. Not only do you get the shiny new features (usually) but older versions of applications may not have had the latest security patches and bugs fixed. This can lead to a less secure or stable system. There were a couple of errors with the updates such as Firefox being listed as out of date and the new version being 3.5 (which at the time of writing is still beta).
Software Informer Community
Software Informer has a community approach to it also. Against each application it is possible to view how many other users of software informer have installed the same application as you. People can leave comments and give the 
software a star rating out of five. You can ask a question about the software or visit the authors website directly from the program too. On Software Informers website you can become a member and see the software your friends have installed. Messages can be sent to other members and you can view their activity. Handily you can view your questions, as well as answers to questions you have asked about software.
Application Launcher
The application launcher part of this program is pretty cool looking. Whilst the main application is running there is a floating icon available on top of other applications. Once clicked it fills your screen with alphabetized icons for programs you have installed that can be launched with another click. Personally I’m not too keen on this feature as I have used other launchers in the past that do the job better such as Launchy. The launcher featured here is okay but feels like an afterthought and would be better as a separate app.
Other Features
Software Informers application itself takes up 10 mb’s of memory on my 32 bit vista installation and along with the slow start time is not something i would have continuously running from startup. If you do choose to have it running all the time then you can specify how often to check for new updates to programs. You can also choose which programs you want to be notified about and it can inform you of any answers to questions you have asked about listed software.
On the main page is a search box that you can use to find software. I tried looking for privacy freeware but the tag freeware wasn’t recognised. Freeware is on the site but you have to sift through the paid for apps to find them. This is not a tool to easily find recommended freeware therefore. This would have been an awesome feature and is something I believe they should look into.
Conclusion
Whilst Software Informer is very good at finding updates to software (it’s primary purpose), it falls down slightly with the slightly bloated and complicated interface. On my system it will replace SUMO for occasional use but I’ll still be using filehippo update checker to regularly check for updates.
KC Software SUMO (Software Update Monitor)
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PrigHerit
4 weeks ago
Wow, I did not heard about that up to the present. Thx.