Keeping clean and shiny (Microsoft) Windows

I have two Windows machines here that I use for those tasks that don’t quite lend themselves to Linux or Windows-in-VMware. I thought they were updated to current with all latest versions, service packs and updates… until I stumbled on a tool called Personal Security Inspector by Secunia.

PSI is a tool that will scan all of your programs and applications and tell you which ones are vulnerable, insecure, out of date, end-of-lifed, and many other things.

I ran it on my Windows laptop which is only about a month old, straight from IBM… and it scored 88%.

[More screenshots here]

The interface is very smart, and once it finds the applications which need updating/patching, it lets you download them directly from the PSI dashboard, where you can install them and re-run the scan.

As you can see in the above screenshot, 9 programs that were out of date were found on my system and needed updating. These included things like Firefox, the Adobe Flash plug-in, VLC, XnView and others.

After I updated as many as I could, I re-ran the scanner and it now found the following results:

[More screenshots here]

You can see that even the interface changed, because now I have the proper Flash version installed and configured within MSIE to render those graphs on the right-side.

There’s a lot more to it, and I haven’t done it enough justice here, but if you run Windows.. give this a try and see if it doesn’t find many things on your system that could be potential security holes on your machine.

The only one I couldn’t seem to update was the Adobe Acrobat application but I’ll look into that later.

Syndicated 2008-04-27 22:37:37 from random neuron misfires