Belarc Advisor will search your computer and tell you everything that is on it. Including all software and hardware that is in or connected to your computer. This information can be very useful for several reasons. Lets suppose you want to check to see if there are any driver updates for the hardware on your computer. Many computer problems can be cured by installing the latest drivers for your devices. Problem is you may not have the technical information that you need to search for new drivers. Belarc will give you this information. After you have the information, you can either go to the manufacturers web site or enter the information into a search engine to search for a driver. If you have a manufacturers web site address that is best. Here are a few hardware devices that you might want to identify and check for driver updates. Printers, CD Drives, Hard drives, Graphic Cards, Scanners, Etc.
You will be given a complete list of all software programs that are installed on your computer and you will be surprised at what you will find. Many times there will be programs listed that you thought you had gotten rid of. You will probably find programs listed that you have no idea what they are, in that case you can copy the program name, type it into a search engine and find what the programs are and what they do. You may decide to remove some of these programs and you can do that by going to the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and remove them. Let me give a warning here, I would not remove a program unless I was sure I knew what is was and what it did. You might want to also check for updates for the programs on your computer. You can go to the makers web site and check or in many cases you can start the program, look for HELP at the top and under HELP you may find a place to check for updates.
While viewing the Belarc Advisor results, look at the bottom of the page for helpful information on finding locations of where things are installed and listed. Here is where you can get Belarc Advisor, www.belarc.com/free_download.html
Here is some good advice to follow, if you update any hardware or software, do it one item at a time, use your computer for a while to see if you can detect any problems. If none are detected then go ahead and install another update if you have one and follow this procedure until all updates are installed. Those of you that have Windows ME or XP can always use the restore function if a problem persists, just restore to a day or so earlier.