Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI) has long been a popular software management tool, automatically alerting users to updates available for a huge list of popular applications.

The company have just released a beta version of PSI 2, though, and that takes a big step forward. Not only can the program detect missing updates, but in some cases it can also locate, download and install the necessary patches, all entirely automatically.

Right now this level of automation is only available on a few of the most commonly-used applications and components: Adobe Flash player, Adobe Reader, Firefox, Skype and so on. These are also commonly exploited by malware, though, so even the current relatively small list of supported programs will help to make user’s PCs significantly safer. And this is only a beta: other applications are sure to be added over time.

If your apps can’t be updated automatically, though, PSI 2 can still help in other ways. Our test PC had an outdated copy of VLC Media Player installed, for instance, and here, as with many other programs, PSI 2 will display an Install Solution button. This is a direct link to the update file you need, and clicking it will initiate an immediate download, no manual browsing required.

And PSI 2 has several other welcome features.

The program can run in the background to monitor new installations, for instance, alerting you if you’re about to install something that isn’t the latest version. It will check for missing Windows security patches. And PSI 2 even calculates a security score for your PC, then plots how this changes over time, perhaps useful to show how your software management has improved.

Download Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI) v2 beta.