F-Secure Health Check 2.0 Beta Ditches ActiveX

F-Secure Health Check is a web application that can perform a health check of a local Microsoft Windows operating system. A health check is basically divided into three areas of interest that are checked and an assessment in the end that lists possible solutions to the problems encountered. Area one will check for installed security software and display information about their state, e.g. if an anti-virus software or desktop firewall is installed and turned on.

Area two will do the same for backup software. It will list installed backup software and inform the user about the state that the installations are in. Area three which is probably the most interesting one to many Windows users will check various critical software programs and compare their version with the one in the F-Secure database. Health Check in this step checks programs like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the Adobe Flash plugin, Mozilla’s Firefox or Sun’s Java runtime.

The information in the solution tab obviously depend on the results of the system scan. A solve button will be displayed if problems have been found in one of the areas that have been investigated by the program. The solutions do fall a bit short, at least in the security tab as the program suggests to use F-Secure products to solve the problem.

It is only natural that a company wants to promote their products. The web application would however be useful to more users if they would have added some choice to the diagnosis. The new beta version of F-Secure Health Check 2 has ditched Microsoft’s ActiveX technology for Java. This means that it is now compatible with a wider range of Internet browsers. The developers list Internet Explorer and Firefox only but it has been successfully tested with Google Chrome as well which increases the chance that other web browsers that support Java will run the application fine as well.

Users who want to give F-Secure Health Check 2 Beta a try can go to the F-Secure website to run it from there.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday September 25, 2009 -
Tags:f-secure, health check, Security, security check, security-software, web application

Responses so far:

1. Wayne says:

   September 25, 2009 at 2:13 am

   Crashed FF

   Reply
2. vikram says:

   September 25, 2009 at 8:44 am

   its crashing frequently on my vista any suggestions

   Reply
3. subgrampus says:

   September 25, 2009 at 2:06 pm

   Worked as advertised on Windows XP Professional SP2.
   Thnx for the info Martin.

   Reply