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Sep 26

Monitor Program Updates with UpdateStar

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Newly Released, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on October 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

There have been tools in the past that monitor programs on your computer for updates, but none is like the new UpdateStar. This free app claims to check for updates on upwards of 80,000 titles including freeware, shareware and commercial software products. That’s quite a database it has got built up!

Here’s a quick list of some features it offers:

Once program updates are available, UpdateStar lets you know and offers you information and download options as well as licensing links in the case of a commercial product or update.
Acts as a replacement for the well known “Add or Remove Programs” within your Windows Control Panel.
You can let it deliver information regarding your complete software setup, or you may also choose to just let UpdateStar look for available update information regarding pre-selected programs you consider important.
The database is maintained by the users, for the users. Thousands of voluntary users help us to keep our database with tens of thousand of software products up-to-date. If you find an update that UpdateStar does not recognize, you can help updating the database by using the “Send Update” link in the product’s details section within the program.
Informs you about available upgrades for your installed programs. By default an icon will appear in your system tray and inform you, when an update for you is available. Simply click on the icon to learn more about the available update(s). To change the settings, please open the “Preferences” tab in your UpdateStar.

I would undoubtedly say that this is the best application available for providing update information, but there was still a large majority of my applications that it couldn’t retrieve info for. Here are some of the more prominent ones that I was shocked to not see included:

It didn’t have version information for some common programs like Live Writer, GIMP, Notepad++, and 7-Zip.
Reported DriverMax 2.5 as the most current version, but as we already know DriverMax 3 has been released.

The screenshot at the beginning of the article is what it looks like when you first run UpdateStar. It gives you an overview of how many programs you have installed on your computer (not how many it is able to actually track), and how many program updates are available. There is also a more detailed product list available where you can see what the current version is for each of the applications it does have info for. The ones that can’t be tracked will say “Unknown” in the current version column:

UpdateStar Product List

Another great way to stay up-to-date on your programs is to follow our Daily Downloads that are posted each weekday. Did you not expect us to do any shameless self promotion?