Updating windows applications

A useful tip for keeping Windows applications up to date

If you have a windows computer, no doubt you have tons of programs installed on it. While Windows update will keep your Operating system and many Microsoft applications up to date, the dozens of other programs on your machine may or may not update themselves with new versions automatically. There is now an excellent solution any user can implement to update many of these packages on Windows 10 and 11. The answer is a simple command-line program called WINGET which is now automatically installed on all Windows 10 and 11 machines. Winget will survey your machine vs a database of tons of 3rd party officially released versions. It will check the version you have installed vs the current version and can AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE most of them to the newer version. To use Winget on windows 10 or 11 you need to:

• Start a command prompt in administrator mode: Hit the windows key and type in CMD. On the panel that opens up choose Open Command Prompt in administrator mode. Put in your admin credentials or if you are already admin on your machine approve the escalation.
• At the command prompt type in this simple command WINGET upgrade -h --all

This will do the following:

Check your machine for all the installed versions, and list them, along with the new version that will be installed.

Immediately beging installing all the versions. In most case this will not involve user input, but in some cases you may need to agree to terms service or approve the install. While there is a way to bypass installations that interact with the user, I recommend leaving it in place so you know what you are agreeing to or installing.

The results will be logged in the command window you executed, when complete you can scroll back through it to look for errors.

You should repeat this process periodically to be sure you have the latest and greatest of all the apps you use. Do observe the log - it will tell you if an installation failed so you can do a manual update or uninstall/reinstall of that application.

Winget is a powerful new tool, and it's likely Microsoft will be moving to using it as the main update tool eventually (even if it's just invoking it in the background) since it addresses more than just Windows OS applications.