By Craig Snyder, MakeUseOf – July 25, 2012 at 10:00PM
Software packagers like Ninite are at an uptick in popularity now that the old seek-and-download method is quickly drawing close towards extinction. Imagine what your kids will think when you tell them that you actually had to search for and manually update certain essential software in the future. Crazy, right?
iOS and other platforms come built around automatic updates to core functionality and additional software that you should install. That’s one huge benefit of having the App Store. Windows isn’t quite there yet. However, that hasn’t kept certain third-party developers from molding that sort of a feature for you. As mentioned before, Ninite makes that easy on you. Soft2Base makes it even easier, and I’ll show you how today.
Click here to check out Soft2Base!
Soft2Base is a software manager for Windows that scans for over 60 of the most popular applications and ensures that your computer is running the very latest version. If not, Soft2Base can silently download and automatically install them for you.
On launch, Soft2Base makes it easy for you by displaying all of their supported software. As you can see at the bottom left, there are display filters that will allow you to narrow down the listed software by installed or not, need to be updated, already up to date, and more recent than listed. In the next screenshot, you’ll see that I’ve filtered to only see software on my system that needs to be updated.
You can then check off the software you’d like to update and click Next. Here, you’ll notice more important options at the bottom left of the screen. You’re able to choose if you’d like to install without comparing, install silently, or download without installing. I never recommend running through silent installs, as that is how you can get toolbars and other bloatware stuffed onto your system.
Soft2Base will automatically begin downloading your software and the installation prompts will automatically pop up if you’ve chosen to install them manually.
I’ve yet to run into any issues on Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) and it’s worked like a charm thus far. Additional features include the ability to create and save a profile that consists of only certain software that you’d like to monitor and keep up to date. The software supports English, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish, and is completely portable. You’re also able to view logs and downloaded files, all within the interface.
Simply put, Soft2Base does everything that we’d be doing manually in an automatic way. Running Soft2Base also means that you’ll be able to disable annoying system services, like iTunes’ auto-updater, Google Update, Java’s update process, and more. This could mean, if you’re on a less beefy system, a faster computer.
As Soft2Base grows, look forward to a larger base of software being supported. From what I’ve read, there are no plans to support Linux and Mac versions of applications yet. Let me know what you think of this neat little tool in the comments!