The Secunia PSI utility, which comes free of charge to consumers, scans Windows systems to provide a clear guide of applications that need patching or are out of date. Better still it provides links to download locations, detailed advisories from Secunia on the flaws and information of where utilities are installed. The product works of Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Source: The Register.

I pretty sceptical of such programs, still I thought I’d give it a go on the work laptop and I was surprised to find that I’d an out of date version of Adobe Flash Player 9.x (General Plug-in) and Sun Java JRE 1.5.x / 5.x – that’s on a machine that’s supposed to be patched to within an inch of its life.

I was able automatically update to flash player 10 by just a click, however the Sun Java update was a little more complex – still that’s nothing to do with Secunia PSI and all to do with Sun, watch out you don’t end up with the , anyway I was able to update to version 1.6 / 6.0.

PSI has two modes simple and advanced; the simple mode is for those with less technological know-how working on the theory its better people fix something than nothing at all.

Selecting the advanced option presents a lot of additional problems that can take some time to fix, and will give you a healthy dislike of Adobe and Sun and the way they handle updates – badly.

So, will I use PSI at home? I don’t think I’ve a choice; I’m just not enthusiastic about spending time patching another PC. Ho-hum!