How to Change Belarc Advisor Settings

Belarc Advisor is a very useful system analysis tool that can be used to scan your Windows system and generate a detailed report about the installed software, hardware, antivirus status, missed Microsoft security hotfixes and other benchmarks. The detailed report is opened as a webpage in your default web browser. When you first use Belarc Advisor, it asks you various questions like whether to update automatically, whether to check for new definitions etc. These options you choose are saved for all future use and Belarc Advisor does not ask you again. Belarc Advisor does not offer any way to change these options at any later stage. If you want to change these options later, then you can follow the instructions below :

1. Using Registry Editor

1. Press the keyboard shortcut Windows logo key + R on your keyboard to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type regedit.exe and press the Enter key. This would open the Windows Registry Editor.
2. In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following key :
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Belarc\Advisor\Prompts

   

3. Under the Prompts subkey, you would find many values likes AutoCheckDefs, AutoDownloadDefs and License Agreement. You can change these values to 1 or -1 (decimal values), to enable or disable them respectively. The following table shows the value names and how the affect Belarc Advisor.

   S.N.	Value names	What they do
   1.	AutoCheckDefs	Automatically check if definitions update is available
   2.	AutoDownloadDefs	Automatically download definitions update if available
   3.	License Agreement	Indicate that you have agreed to Belarc Advisor license agreement

4. The changes take effect as soon as you alter the above registry values. If you have already run Belarc Advisor in the current Windows session, then you might have to restart Windows for the new settings to load.

2. Using Belarc Advisor Settings Changer

Alternatively, you can download our Belarc Advisor Settings Changer tool to quickly toggle these settings on or off. This tool is a standalone and portable Windows application that I created because I had accidentally set the wrong options for Belarc Advisor (accidentally setting it not to check for new definitions). You can download the ZIP archive, extract the contents to a folder and run BelarcSettings.exe. This tool does not require to be run in the Administrator mode as the changes are made only to the currently logged in user’s registry hives.

In the Belarc Advisor Settings Changer, you can check or un-check the checkboxes and then click on the Save Settings button to save the settings. It would automatically make the changes in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive of the registry. The tool was tested on Belarc Advisor version 8.2g but should work on future versions as well.