Submitted by Jan Ivar Beddari

Secunia has some tools similar to Belarc Advisor which you might want to take a look at.

There’s a personal edition of Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) which is free and a business edition with network scanning features. The company is quite well known around EU for their website and security bulletins so I thought I should mention them ..

This util is quite new. I like it better than Belarc

From the publisher’s site

The Secunia PSI is the FREE security tool that is designed with the sole purpose of helping you secure your computer from software vulnerabilities. Software vulnerabilities affect all applications installed on your computer, from the Operating System down to your email client, office application, instant messaging, and so on.

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Submitted by David Pope

The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private no your PC and is not sent to any web server.

• Operating Systems: Runs on Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT 4, Me, 98, and 95.
• Browsers: Requires IE 3 or Netscape 3, and higher versions. Also runs on Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox.
• File size: 1642 KB.
• License: The license associated with this product allows for free personal use only. Use on multiple PCs in a corporate, educational, military or government installation is prohibited. See the license agreement for details.

Belarc Advisor

Rate this tool: (3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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According to a ZDNet article, the average downtime of Windows Server 2003 was increased by 25% in 2007 whereas the downtime of major Linux distros such as Red Hat and Novell decreased by about 75%. The downtime of Windows Server 2003 is nine hours per server, RHEL average downtime is only 1.75 hours.

These are certainly interesting numbers. The article also explains why the downtime of Windows Server 2003 went up. It seems as if there were more Windows updates in 2007 requiring reboots. Hence, one cannot conclude that Windows Server 2003 systems are crashing more often than Linux systems.

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I blogged about this stealth update issue two weeks ago. Now, Scott Dunn reports on Windows Secrets that it conflicts with the XP’s repair option. This feature allows you to recover an XP installation that became unbootable. It seems that the new Windows Update agent is not able to install the 80 latest patches if the system was recovered with the XP repair option.

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It is the number one topic for the last two days in the tech blogosphere. Microsoft changed some files on Windows XP and Vista machines via Windows Update without asking for permission. Nate Clinton, product manager Windows Update, meanwhile tried to clarify this incident in the Microsoft Update Product Team Blog. In my view, his explanation is not plausible.

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Whenever I have to deal with Microsoft’s update services, I get confused about the different terms. When I configured the security health validator (SHV) policy of NAP (Network Access Protection) in Windows Server 2008, I was puzzled again by the difference of the phrases “Automatic Updates”, “Windows Update” and “Microsoft Update”.

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I didn’t know that one can upgrade Firefox to Internet Explorer. At least this is what Microsoft recommends when you access the new Microsoft Update Catalog with Firefox. This catalog allows you to perform a full-text search in Microsoft Update database and download the patches. You can import these updates in WSUS or System Center Configuration Manager 2007. This is all quite useful.

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Ryan Naraine from ZDNet is lamenting over Microsoft’s strategy of secretly releasing patches without disclosing its corresponding vulnerability. This certainly is an old discussion. However, how frankly Microsoft admits this in a bulletin of a patch, I suppose, is new.

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Symantec has just published their new Internet Security Threat Report. They compared Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, HP and Sun. And guess what? Microsoft got the best grades! You know, there are many comparable studies and they all find different things depending on who financed them. But this one is interesting.

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You can now download WSUS 3.0 at Microsoft Connect. It looks like the final release of WSUS 3.0 (Windows Server Update Services) is just around the corner. We have been working with Microsoft’s patch management solution since the availability of SUS and were always quite satisfied with it. I never liked its user interface, though.

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