Secunia retires Personal Software Inspector (PSI)

When Secunia launched Personal Software Inspector (PSI) almost a decade ago, it was welcome with open arms by users who wanted to run security scans on Windows systems to detect security issues and outdated applications.

The company switched from an online tool to a software program and launched version 3.0 of the application back in 2012. Version 3.0 of the program featured a new streamlined interface and lacked some of the features that previous versions of the program supported.

Today, Flexera announced that Personal Software Inspector will reach end of life on April 20, 2018. The official product website reveals that to interested users; download options are no longer available already.

The company notes that existing installations of the program won't work anymore come April 20, 2018 and that users should remove Personal Software Inspector from systems the program is installed on.

PSI is Flexera’s free computer security solution that identifies missing security patches on user’s private PC, and automatically installs them when possible.

This product is reaching End-of-life on April 20, 2018, and therefore, no longer available. On April 20, 2018, existing installations of PSI will no longer function and should be uninstalled.

A forum thread provides further insight. Senior Product Manager Bob Kelly notes:

Discontinuing PSI hasn't been an easy decision. Consumer products are not part of Flexera's Strategy to help businesses that develop software and business using software address the challenge of this very dysfunctional supply chain.

Flexera withdraws the consumer product as it focuses on business products. As far as alternatives are concerned, Kelly suggests to keep the computer save by turning on automatic updates in all products that support the functionality, manually update all other programs, and to uninstall software that is no longer in use.

Personal Software Inspector Alternatives

Personal Software Inspector checked for outdated applications and offered to download and install those on the Windows machine.

The following programs may be suitable alternatives:

• Avira Free Software Updater review
• FileHippo App Manager: software update checker
• Kaspersky releases beta version of Software Update checker
• Patch My PC Updater 4.0 review
• Sumo 4 and new Pro version released
• UCheck: update checker and software installer by RogueKiller creator

Closing Words

Personal Software Inspector lost much of its appeal with the release of version 3.0. While it was still useful to some degree to verify program installations on Windows PCs, other programs like SUMO offered better functionality and support for a larger set of programs.