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keeping desktop applications up to date

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I've installed something called Glary Utilities to mind my PC's stability and security. I've discovered that in addition to the usual tools like registry cleaning and drive defragmentation, it does a very good job of alerting you to applications that are out of date.

And as we all know, keeping applications up to date is one of the Australian Signal Directorate's "essential 8" and on basically every other list of security controls produced by man.

With the free version of the Glary software you get a warning when a desktop application is out of date. You then have to manually update the application, but you get a handy link to the Glary website that contains a link to a no-hassle download. With a paid version of the software ($20/year), presumably there is some automation.

Glary seems to be a modern replacement for "crap cleaner", which became "CCleaner", which became an intrusive and resource-consuming cloud-based something. In that regard, the tools is far better than CCleaner. Glary's so far been pretty stable in of itself, though I've got one battered and aging Windows 7 laptop on which it's starting to have problems. But for now it deals with an issue with which I've seen IT organizations struggle badly.