Belarc Advisor

[auen1]

I came across this website that makes a profile of your computer. Belarc Advisor - Free Personal PC Audit, for software, hardware and security configuration information on your computer. Software license management, IT asset management, cyber security audits, and more.
Gives a lot of good info.

One of the interesting reports is the "Security Benchmark Score"
I got a rating of 1.25 out of 10.
I was wondering what you guys thought about the criteria of this test, (the report).
What score did you get?

[Force Flow]

Most of the items specifying what settings should be enabled/disabled are irrelevant. The score is mostly arbitrary.

What Belarc is useful for is grabbing hardware information (although speccy is another useful tool), showing what software is installed and (sometimes) their licenses keys, and showing which windows updates are/aren't installed.

[David M]

I have played around with the Belarc Security Benchmark score. Basically it will give you a really bad score if things like Java and Adobe Reader are not current....even if your anti-malware software is up to date.

In the report it says why you got a less than perfect score with links to the appropriate websites for those updates.

The bad score bugged me at first, but screw it, the lousy score is not justified.

Right now I have a 1.25 out of 10 score for one 32 bit and one 64 bit Java update which has not been done. Really Belarc?...it's that big of an issue?

So when you do go the the Oracle website that Belarc links to, there are 6 Java patches to choose from with an unclear explanation of which you need, nor any explanation of how you make this determination. It would have been nice if they had asked: Your version of Java is out of date. Would you like to fix this? Yes or no?...but that would be too easy for the people who are not computer geeks.

Computer engineers seriously need to spend more time with grandma on her PC in order to witness what it is like to not know everything about computers and how frustrating that can be. I guess that's why more and more people have Apples. Apple would have just fixed the problem for you without asking or make you go all over the internet and then make you guess which is the right patch. Thanks Larry, that was really helpful. I hope your mega-yacht does not run aground because of bad karma.

[Preston]

Originally Posted by Force Flow What Belarc is useful for is grabbing hardware information (although speccy is another useful tool), showing what software is installed and (sometimes) their licenses keys, and showing which windows updates are/aren't installed.

Same here, I run and save a Belarc, SIW (Free Version) or a Speccy Profile before I do a reinstall.

[jdeb]

Secunia PSI can help with keeping thing updated.