anyweb Posted Sunday at 02:53 PM Report post Posted Sunday at 02:53 PM Introduction If you work with computers like I do, then the Patch My PC name should be very familiar to you. They’ve been at the forefront of Patching Windows computers in enterprises for years now and are well known, trusted, admired and praised. They have some of the smartest names in tech working for them and certainly know how to produce excellent software. They actually started out in 2011 by releasing a free tool to Windows users to patch their PC’s and that tool was originally called PatchMyPC. They’ve since renamed that free tool to Patch My PC home updater. As the name implies, you can use home updater on your home computers and I’ll take a good look at it in this blog post. Home updater is designed for home use, not for your business, and it can patch up to 532 or so applications natively (the list is growing). But first off, why would you want to patch your 3rd party applications on your home computers ? well that’s how 70% of malware attacks exploit outdated vulnerabilities. Windows update will handle things like security updates for Windows and drivers, but third party apps are your problem. Not any more 🙂 Download home updater You can download the home updater from here. It comes in both MSI (installer) and EXE (executable) formats, I chose the MSI. After accepting the license terms and conditions it’s ready to install. After it’s installed you’ll be presented with (in my case) and load of apps that are out-dated. I’m so glad I decided to run this. When you start it it won’t automatically update these out-of-date applications until you actually click on the Start Updater button, however there is an option in the Settings to enable that and you can also configure it to run on a schedule. Let’s take a look at the options in the left of the app. Apps – The main interface screen, shows you which apps you have installed and whether they are out of date or not Startup – Gives an extensive list of apps that startup when your computer starts, this is great and shows much more than you see in the ‘startup apps’ option of Task Manager. Uninstaller – Use this to uninstalls apps you may not need any more Scheduler – use this to schedule scans and updates, comes with recommended settings and is disabled by default. Settings – Use this to configure home-updater specific settings About – About the home-updater app. On the right of the app you’ll see a Start Updater button, I wanted to see how good it was so that’s exactly what I clicked. After clicking that you’ll see your selected apps pending update as it attempts to download and update the latest version of those apps. Note: If you don’t want an app automatically updated, you can disable that ability by clicking on the three dots beside the app in question (ellipses) and selecting “Disable Auto Updating”. When running the updater, let it do it’s thing, you’ll see apps starting and updating right before your very eyes. Some apps may also prompt you to login, I’m not sure if that is required in order to complete the update but I hadn’t used some apps in a while and therefore those apps wanted me to login, such as the EA Account app shown below. After letting the home updater app run for some time, the status of individual applications started to change from Outdated, to PENDING, UPDATING and finally Up to Date as shown below. Side note. I’m not sure why pending and updating ended up all caps but that’s one for the UI guys at the Patch My PC team. After waiting some time, I could see that the home-updater was sitting on the Logitech G HUB app for quite some time. I can understand that, as it’s a terrible piece of software and has bricked a keyboard on me. But… what should I do ? Wait or try and move on. At this point the ‘tech in me’ wanted to look at the log file for the home-updater. I checked the installed folder but couldn’t find any logs there, next I checked the Settings section of the app, and it listed the log file location, great. And here’s the log, and guess what, there’s the Logitech app too… Opening the C:\ProgramData\PatchMyPC\PatchMyPCHomeUpdater.log file up with CMTrace (the best log file reader ever IMHO) revealed that not a whole lot has been happening for the last hour or more. So it does look like Logitech G Hub has thrown a spanner in the works. To fix it, I’ll cancel the updater. And for now, exclude Logitech’s crappy app. Except, after clicking Cancel Updater, nothing happened apart from the main UI showing most apps as Outdated in red again. Shouldn’t the Cancel Updater button change to Start updater again ? When I tried to exclude the troublesome app (Logitech G Hub) by clicking on Disable Auto Updating it was greyed out. most likely because the exe file for updating that app was in the logfile source folder and it was still trying to update that app. But then, why didn’t Cancel Updater kill it ? So I closed the home updater app, and restarted it to see would there be a difference. There was, now I could disable the auto-updating feature for Logitech G HUB. Once done, I clicked on Start Updater, and off it went for the second time. This time however, you can see the Logitech G HUB app has a disabled icon in red. Cool, let’s hope it works. This time around I could see it updating each app quickly, which was great, and I was seeing more and more green Up to date statuses. The OCD in me wants all the apps up to date, but let’s see what we can do. After a few more minutes it was done, as the updater button reverted to Start Updater, and all but 2 apps were updated! At this point, I wanted to see if it could fix Logitech G Hub and the other app, so I re-enabled updating on the troublesome app and started the updater again. It gave up and the log file revealed some issues with the EXE and a call to some SSL address. I don’t blame the home-updater tool here at all for this, but maybe it could inform the end user with a popup or some UI hint other than Outdated that clearly stated that it had a problem updating this app. At this point I managed to get 34 out of 36 apps updated. Not bad at all. Uninstalling bad apps As I had two apps that clearly were not interested in updating, I decided to uninstall them. You can do that by navigating to the Uninstaller section of the app or simply clicking the three dots on the app in question and selecting Uninstall App. That action prompted the apps to present me with various popups about uninstalling the app, which is OK, but would be nicer if it was a silent uninstall. Once done, I clicked on Re-Scan to check my current status as one of the two bad apps was still listed (guess which one). After the Re-Scan, it all looked good. Note to developers at Patch My PC, trigger a re-scan automatically, after a user chooses to Uninstall and app. I’m sure you are doing that already as it worked for the CrystalDiskMark app, but not for the Logitech G HUB app. Below you can see that All apps are up to date! Job done! Setting up a schedule Security waits for no one, so you should definitely setup a schedule for your Patch My PC home updater. Click on the Scheduler button and select the + ON button. Once done you can see that it has a default of running at Monday, 7PM and to repeat daily. What I like is it also enables the Run ASAP when Missed option by default, which is great as you probably are not using your computer every day. Once you are happy with your settings, make sure to click on Save Schedule, to save the schedule otherwise nothing will happen. You’ll get a popup (aha, they can do popups!) informing you that it’s saved. After clicking OK, you can see the schedule tasks are created, one for updating the app itself, and one for updating your third party apps. Modifying Startup apps I mentioned that the Startup button allows you to modify startup apps, and it does it much better than the similar option in Windows Task Manager Startup Apps. Compare these results. Below is what you see available in the Startup Apps view of Task Manager. Versus the really populated view from Patch My PC home-updater. Quite a difference! Summary The Patch My PC home updater app is incredible, it helps you patch your home computers third party apps with ease, and does it using a very easy to use interface. It also allows you to setup schedules to make sure those third party apps are kept up to date to ensure that you are as secure at home, as you are at work. I can highly recommend this software, and best of all, its FREE. 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