Install software on your computer and you’ll be forgiven for not having the spare time to search for updates. Most applications do not have a software update facility, so unless you go checking, you’ll often never know it’s been updated.

With this in mind, and software developers running out of key ideas to add to future revisions to encourage paid upgrades, we’re seeing ‘Software Updater’ tools being released to the market or added to system maintenance applications. IObit recently released a standalone Software Updater tool this year which we wrote about this month.

CCleaner 5.55 is here and the big new feature is a software update module. We were assuming – or guessing – this is based on Piriform’s FileHippo database (Piriform is owned by Avast, which in turn also owns FileHippo), but when we ran CCleaner 5.55 Professional, the software updater correctly noted we had BurnAware 12.0 installed, but claimed no update was available, when BurnAware 12.1 was already released. We manually checked against the FileHippo website and it still had BurnAware 11.8 listed. So it’s not using FileHippo.

Sadly, as we’ve found with many software updaters, it ignored most of the software from our test PC, only finding BurnAware and IcoFX (which it correctly identified as out-of-date). Although Chrome, Firefox and other browsers auto-update, most software update tools warn you if the installed version has an update available. As an example, we’re running Chrome 72 on our test PC and v73 was available. Chrome was ignored in CCleaner 5.55 Professional. As was Adobe Brackets, Directory Opus, Firefox and even tools such as Avast SecureLine and Avast Cleanup, from the owner of CCleaner.

If CCleaner finds an update, it will automatically download the new installer and update an application. You can select multiple tools to update and CCleaner will work through each one.

The software updater is only available within the commercial Professional version of CCleaner, although Piriform has reduced Professional to $14.95, down from $24.95, saving $10 to celebrate the launch of the software updater.

What else is new in CCleaner 5.55? Opera plugins were not being displayed correctly and this is fixed.

Download CCleaner 5.55 or the 14-day trial version of CCleaner 5.55 Professional.