Make sure that your Windows applications are kept up to date

Open a web browser and go to the Nabber website. When the page loads, click the Appupdater link in the left-hand menu and then at the next page, click the first link in the News list (this lists the releases of Appupdater with the most recent in first place). At the next screen, click the green Download button and, if the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and then choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now locate and double-click the downloaded file.

If another security warning pops up, click the Run button to start the Appupdater Setup wizard. When it appears, click Next and follow the instructions, accepting the licence agreement and all the defaults. Just before the installation finishes, be sure to place a tick in the box next to the ‘Select the repositories you want to use’ and then click Next. Also ensure that the Run Appupdater item is ticked and click the Finish button.

When Appupdater launches, click the Download Apps List button on the toolbar. This will prompt Appupdater to download around 100 program ‘definitions’, so it can compare them with whatever’s stored on your PC. When the definitions have been downloaded, click the Installed radio button just below the button bar and then click the Rescan button. After a moment, Appupdater will display all the programs it knows about that are installed on your PC – those programs with available updates are highlighted in pink.

Click the Available Updates radio button and Appupdater will display those programs due for updating together with their version numbers. Although it’s possible to update all out-of-date software at once, try one first to see how it goes. In this example, we have clicked on 7-Zip (a file-compression program that’s installed on our test PC) and then clicked the Install button on the right. When the Install dialogue box appears, choose which version to install from the dropdown menu (the most recent edition is selected by default). Click OK.

The nice thing about Appupdater is that once you have chosen to update an individual program using the Install button it just gets on with it. No installation wizards or further dialogue boxes appear: Appupdater does everything in the background. Here, for example, we waited for the installation to finish, then launched 7-Zip, opened the Help menu and clicked About to open this dialogue box. Refer back to the previous screenshot you will see that it has been updated to the latest version.

Alternatively, instruct Appupdater to download and install new versions of everything it finds that needs updating. Click the Rescan button and when the results come back, click the radio button under the button bar labelled ‘Available Updates’. Click the Install All Updates button on the toolbar and then sit back while Appupdater downloads and installs the latest versions of all the software it can find. It may not find everything, but it’s still a real time-saver.