patndoris TechnoGeek

Ever wonder what you’d do if you had to reinstall your OS (Operating System)? How in the world would you get all those programs you’ve installed back on? How would you even remember what they were? Ever been asked about some hardware component you have on your machine and you have no idea what you might have? Well there’s an easy and free way to find all this information and more!

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“The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser.” It’s free and it’s safe. Your data isn’t sent anywhere other than a page you can view (and save if you wish) in your browser.

Now, if you have a catastrophic failure, and you have to reinstall, I’m not suggesting this is the best resource to get yourself back up and running. For that, I personally prefer disk imaging (which I’ll write about another time). However, if you don’t have the means to do imaging, and you do take the time to regularly backup your personal data, this is possibly an option to help you know what programs you had. In fact, when I had to transfer programs from my old dying computer to my new desktop, I used a printed copy of my Belarc from the old machine as a kind of checklist for what I wanted to install on my new machine. It still took ages to get it all done, but at least I had some idea (a roadmap of sorts) of what I was going to do.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by those programs you can see are installed on your machine, but are not listed in Add/Remove programs, this is a great tool. There’s a link for each program to show you where the program resides on your machine. If all else fails, you can go through the tedious steps to manually remove a program so long as you know where it’s hiding. Of course, if it’s available in Add/Remove I’d always suggest removing it there, or use Revouninstaller if you have it. Sometimes though, manual removal methods are the only choice, and a Belarc can be a wonderful tool to assist you.

Just a quick note, Belarc Advisor is free for personal use. If you want to use it in a work environment you should take a look at some of the other options they offer. I suggest running one maybe two of these a year and storing the resulting file somewhere safe. If you ever need it you’ll have it.