UPDATE 2016-10-10: It's possible that Chocolatey version 0.10.0 gave me a malware infection a couple of months ago. However, that does not seem to be the case. I have not had any trouble so far with Chocolatey v0.10.1 or 0.10.3. See further notes in the Comments section.
END UPDATE
I recently discovered Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org. This is what I am using at the moment.
This is a command-line tool. It requires administrative privileges (naturally). After I installed it, I ran the following commands, among others, to install various applications and register them with Chocolatey:
choco install 7zip
choco install firefox
choco install adblockplus-firefox
choco install GoogleChrome
choco install adblockpluschrome
choco install opera
choco install adblockplusopera
choco install git
choco install github
choco install notepadplusplus
choco install SublimeText2
choco install vlc
Now, any time I want to check for updates to any of these, and automatically install any updates found, I just run:
choco upgrade all
or
choco upgrade all -y
(to accept all upgrade confirmations)
Works like a charm.