Use PowerShell to Retrieve All Windows Updates and Patches

In this post we provide a quick example of how we can use PowerShell to retrieve all Windows updates and patches.

Get-HotFix Not Returning All Installed KBs

The first thought that springs to mind is simply to run Get-Hotfix.  However this only returns a subset of windows updates supplied by Component Based Servicing.

A more comprehensive way of returning historic windows updates and patches is to use the Microsoft Update Session object like so:

cls
$session = New-Object -ComObject "Microsoft.Update.Session"
$searcher = $Session.CreateUpdateSearcher()
$totalHistoryCount = $Searcher.GetTotalHistoryCount()
$searcher.QueryHistory(0, $totalHistoryCount) | Select-Object  -Property @{Name = 'Name'; Expression = {[regex]::match($_.Title,'KB\d{7}').Groups[0].Value}}, Title, Date

If we wanted to search for a specific KB reference we can simply pipe the output into Where like so:

cls
$session = New-Object -ComObject "Microsoft.Update.Session"
$searcher = $Session.CreateUpdateSearcher()
$totalHistoryCount = $Searcher.GetTotalHistoryCount()
$searcher.QueryHistory(0, $totalHistoryCount) | Select-Object  -Property @{Name = 'Name'; Expression = {[regex]::match($_.Title,'KB\d{7}').Groups[0].Value}}, Title, Date | Where Name -eq "KB2267602"