It has been found that malware infects those system on which the installed third-party programs are not kept updated, in addition to updating the Windows itself. Keeping all the installed software updated, makes you safe from the vulnerabilities which are present in the older and unpatched software. Although you can manually download and update all the software you want, but it is a cumbersome process. As an alternative, you can automatically update all the installed third-party programs using the Patch My PC utility.
Patch My PC is a free Windows application that may help you keeping programs on your computer updated. It is a portable and reliable utility designed to check your system against the current versions of popular software like Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Mozilla Firefox, Oracle Java, Apple Quicktime, Apple iTunes, Microsoft Updates and more. You can download it from the Patch My PC website and run it right away as it does not require any installation.
When you run it for the first time, it automatically scans your system and shows the summary in the right side of the window. The updated and patched software is shown in the green color, software which is not installed on your system is shown in the black color and the software which is not patched is shown in the red color.
On the top-left of the window, you can see the number of important updates, common updates and other updates available for your system. By default, it checks for the updates of only common software that everyone has on their Windows system like Adobe Flash, Oracle Java etc. But you can choose to find updates for many other sofware in the Common Software section. The Other Tools section also has tools for managing startup entries for Windows and an uninstall tool for removing installed programs. If you want to perform the updates, then just click on the Perform Updates button in the lower-right of the Patch My PC. This would automatically download the updates and install them.
You can set Windows to automatically download and install updates in the Control Panel. But now with Patch My PC, you can also download and install updates of other third-party software. Patch My PC is free and portable, so you can carry it around in your USB pen drive. You can download Patch My PC from its website at http://www.patchmypc.net/.