Belarc Advisor 12.1.0

Overview

Belarc Advisor is a unique freeware designed to created a profile based on your system’s installed hardware and software, including hard drives, networking devices, missing Windows updates, firewall/anti-virus status and many more. This profile information is kept in your computer and is displayed thoroughly in your web browser in the form of a web page. All this data is saved locally and is not sent to any third-party.

Installation

Installation is very simple and finishes in an instant. Afterwards the program starts scanning your computer and when it finishes you are directed to the web page with all the results (depending on the installed software and hardware the scan might take more or less time). There are no special requirements for the software to run properly, and it can work under any Windows operating system (both 32 and 64 bit versions are supported).

Interface

There is no main interface, as all the results are presented in your web browser. At the top of the window there is a summary of your system’s security status, and below that you can see the detailed information which is organized neatly in categories. On the left side there are links for easier navigation in the page and to avoid scrolling.

Pros

Not only it gathers the information of virtually anything that exists in your computer, but it also informs you of missing Microsoft security hotfixes and how crucial they are as well. The ones tagged as Critical and Important are required to be installed for security benchmarks.

A new feature that has been recently added is a log of past USB storage devices used in past 30 days. You can see which USB flash disks have been connected recently, and when was first and last time used. It helps you identify if any flash disks were connected without you knowing.

Cons

The data provided for hardware like the GPU or the hard drive is not very detailed, as it could also inform you of temperature levels, voltage, current and other kind of information.

Alternatives

Speccy is reliable and easy to use software that scans and displays in a comprehensive manner information about the hardware and software installed in your computer. In contrast to Belarc advisor, Speecy has a general user interface. Another program with the same purpose is AIDA64. Not only it can show you information about your computer’s gear, but it also contains a lot of tools used to benchmark, overclock, monitor, fine-tune and many other features.

Conclusion

This program is very simple and you don’t have to be an expert in order to use it as the only thing you have to do is launch it. The main aspects are available to you in short time, giving you an instant overview of everything you should know and how it affects your system. Even though it lacks features for further analysis, it is an overall great program that can advise you to increase your computer's security and fix vulnerabilities that you are not aware of.