Many years ago I ran across this funny name program called Belarc Advisor. As an IT consultant, this program helped me a lot in ascertaining what hardware and software was installed on a machine.
The Belarc Advisor program is a free download licensed for personal use at home or work on a standalone machine. (Their is a network version for a price.) The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, local network inventory, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, security benchmarks and displays the results in a Web browser. Sorry, their is no free Mac version but you can find alternatives, just click here.
Belarc Advisor excels at providing those hard to find product keys or serial numbers for your installed programs.
Belarc products are used world wide in over 50 million computers. All of the profile information is kept private on your computer and is not sent to any web server. Some requirements are as follows:
- Operating Systems: Runs on Windows 10, 2016, 8.1, 2012 R2, 8, 2012, 7, 2008 R2, Vista, 2008, 2003 SP2, XP SP3. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows are supported. Their commercial products also run on all other versions of Windows and on the Macintosh OS X, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.
- Browsers: Runs on Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and many others.
Installation
- Download your copy of Belarc Advisor.
- Either save the installer executable file to your download folder and run from there or click the file located in the lower left hand corner to install.
- You may get a popup dialog box about Windows is protecting your PC. If so, click on the More Info link then click Run anyway.
- Follow the install instructions.
- Click Yes to check for new Advisor definitions. When finished, click OK.
- Advisor will now build a profile of your machine and check your local network.
- A profile will be presented in your browser as noted in below screenshot:
Your Machine Profile Results
- In the upper left hand corner is a menu for the sections of the profile. Just click on one or scroll.
- Under the section Software Versions and Usage, you can click on the “i” for details.
- Your product keys are in the Software Licenses section. These are the ones the program was able to find.
- Pay attention to the Virus Protection, Missing Security Updates and Installed Microsoft Hotfixes sections to see if your machine is up-to-date.
- Since the profile is presented in your browser, you can right click anywhere and select Print to print the results.
You may be surprised at all the hardware and software installed on your machine.
My next post will deal with a detailed hardware inventory. Belarc Advisor is mainly for a listing of your installed software.
I Would Like to Hear from You
Please feel free to leave a comment about using Belarc Advisor. I would love hearing from you. Do you have a computer tech question? I will do my best to answer your inquiry. Please mention the app and version that you are using. To help me out, you can send screenshots of your data related to your question.
Related:
Using PC Audit and Speccy for hardware inventory
Tech Savvy Life 