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.