Verdict
Excellent application that will enable you to check for and install updates for applications installed on your system
Review Rating:
Type: Time limited demo
Platform: Windows Vista 64-bit, Windows 7, Windows 7 64-bit, Windows Vista, Windows XP
Manufacturer: exono GmbH
Size: 4.9MB
Number of Downloads: 8434
Price: $ 34.95
Once you’ve installed an application on your system, unless it was supplied with an automatic update tool, you’ll probably forget to check to see if a new version has been released. With some freeware and shareware titles, new updates can be made available on a weekly basis. Many of the new releases may not contain new features, but they may contain bug fixes that might make the software perform more securely or efficiently on your system.
One option is to scour Download sites such as www.vnunet.com/downloads. Another option is to use a tool that will search through your installed applications and then find updates, if an update exists.
UpdateStar is such an application. It’s well designed and borrows the ribbon interface from Office 2007. You can set up an automatic update check and even purchase software installed, such as trial software.
This software shows potential. Whether it will support all your applications is another matter, although on our test system it did seem to find and check for updates for around half of our installed applications, although some of those 'upgrades' were earlier versions of installed software.
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Do you agree?
Possible Malware
After a smooth installation, I did a scan and the program found 3 out of date programs. One was correctly detected. However, when I tried to download the updated version, AVG anti-virus warned me that it detected download-winx3250.zip.exe but the .exe extension was hidden. I instructed the program to quarantine the program. The file I was trying to download was RocketDock 1.3.5 and that appeared to download OK, and a scan with AVG did not detect anything. To be certain, I went to the RocketDock site and redownloaded the file, and this time no malware was detected.
This raises two questions: Did AVG detect a false positive and/or where is Update Star getting its downloads? In addition it identified the latest version f Mailwasher Pro as 4.19, yet that is a very old version and the latest is 6.0. It also showed a number of programs with later current versions than the ones on my PC, but did not indicated that they should be updated.
I did check with TCPView to see if it was active on the internet when apparently idle, but did not detect any activity. This program has potential,but the malware detection should put anyone off using it. As far as program performance, it has a way to go before it can be both reliable and trustworthy.
Posted by Howard Mirkin, 07 Oct 2007
No Malware involved
Hello Howard, we double checked your feedback and could not find a download like you posted related to the program you named and in the entire database, so it must have come from a different source. Please feel free to contact the UpdateStar support via e-mail, if you have further questions: support@updatestar.com
Of course you can use the "Send update" button from within the UpdateStar application to update a program information. Your user input is always welcome!
Posted by Frank Alperstaedt, UpdateStar, 09 Oct 2007
Update Notifier
I use Update Notifier from CleanSofts.org
http://cleansofts.org/view/update-notifier.html which is simple to use as the task itself.
Posted by uncledan, 07 May 2008