Last Windows Update Information

We use the com object Microsoft.Update.Session to get the update results.

Below one liner will tell us the previous update search and the last update installation date.

(New-Object -com "Microsoft.Update.AutoUpdate").Results

Output:

LastSearchSuccessDate LastInstallationSuccessDate
--------------------- --------------------------- 
 6/17/2021 3:54:31 AM  6/16/2021 3:57:34 AM

New Windows Update Count

Furthermore, to get the number of updates which are yet to be installed.

$UpdateSession = New-Object -ComObject Microsoft.Update.Session
$UpdateSearcher = $UpdateSession.CreateupdateSearcher()
$Updates = @($UpdateSearcher.Search("IsInstalled=0").Updates)

#This will give the number of updates yet to install.
$Updates.Title.count 

Pending Operating System Restart

Any pending restart because of previous update can be identified through the registry “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\RebootRequired”

The entry will have a value “true” if the operating system is waiting for a restart which is needed to complete an update.

Windows Update Status

Above codes can be combined to get following information about a computer.

1. LastSearchSuccessDate
2. LastInstallationSuccessDate
3. NewUpdateCount
4. PendingReboot

We can now wrap the script with invoke-command to remote execute in multiple systems

function Get-WindowsUpdateInformation()
 {
     param
     (
         [Parameter()]
         [string[]]
         $ComputerName="localhost"
     )


     $Results = Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock  {     
         $result = (New-Object -com "Microsoft.Update.AutoUpdate").Results     
         $UpdateSession = New-Object -ComObject Microsoft.Update.Session     
         $UpdateSearcher = $UpdateSession.CreateupdateSearcher()     
         $Updates = @($UpdateSearcher.Search("IsInstalled=0").Updates)     
         $PendingReboot = $false     
    
         #Checking pending reboot
         if (Get-Item "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\RebootRequired" -EA Ignore) { $PendingReboot=$true }     
   
         #Framing the result to a list
         New-Object psobject -Property @{         
              LastSearchSuccessDate = $result.LastSearchSuccessDate         
              LastInstallationSuccessDate = $result.LastInstallationSuccessDate         
              NewUpdateCount = $Updates.Title.count         
              PendingReboot = $PendingReboot     
         } 
     } -ComputerName $ComputerName 

     $Results | Select-Object @{Name="ServerName"; Expression={$_.PSComputerName}}, LastSearchSuccessDate, LastInstallationSuccessDate, NewUpdateCount, PendingReboot
 }
 

Multiple server/computer names can be passed as an array to get the update information, or the server name can also be read from a text file and passed as parameter.

Get-WindowsUpdateInformation -ComputerName testhost1, testhost2

Output:

ServerName LastSearchSuccessDate LastInstallationSuccessDate NewUpdateCount PendingReboot
---------- --------------------- --------------------------- -------------- -------------
 testhost1  6/17/2021 5:31:12 PM  5/16/2021 2:56:21 PM                     1         False
 testhost2  6/16/2021 6:33:22 PM  5/21/2021 4:22:34 AM                     1         False

If you have some better ideas or know other ways of doing this, please comment it. It will be informative for me and for the readers.

Hope you liked this article and thank you for reading

We can leverage the pnputil.exe tool to perform the installation fast and easy.

Consider a scenario of a multiple drivers packed to an iso image. Below script will install all the required drivers.

# Mount the driver iso image
Mount-DiskImage D:\Driver\drivers-windows.iso

# Get the mount point/drive letter, considering that the above one is the only disk mounted
$isoMount = (Get-DiskImage -DevicePath \\.\CDROM0  | Get-Volume).DriveLetter

# Find the inf files and install
Get-ChildItem "$($isoMount):\" -Recurse -Include *.inf | ForEach-Object {
     $_.FullName
     pnputil /add-driver $_.FullName /install 
}

Running the script would update all the drivers which are meant for your system hardware.

Hope you like this article and thank you for reading.

Note: The following happened while I was updating my laptop. The situation can be different for individuals and below workaround may or may not work for you.

Also make sure you have the backup of your data.

What happened…

Windows 10 booting stuck with black screen after applying updates

The laptop restarted for applying the feature update 1909. The system booting halted to a Black screen. Even after 1 hour, there was no state change.

I did power reset of the laptop and still the same.

What did I do to fix it…

I tried power reset couple of times and finally the windows 10 repair option turned out.

The first option I tried was to automatically repair and it failed.

The second option was to reset the system keeping the files. But the process failed at 20 percent.

Again, I tried full reset with option to remove all the files. Surprisingly that too failed at 2 percent which should not happen.

Now the only option left was to clean install the operating system again.

Before attempting that, I went through the repair options and tried the recovery point restore. Since the reset option failed, I had no hope for this. I could see few restore points in the list and selected the one with time stamp before I did windows update.

The recovery point restoration ran for a couple of hours and finally the operating system came back to life with previous version of Windows 10.

Hope this is helpful to you and thank you for reading the article.