What Is Different between the OS’s on Two Machines?

Don't you love it when your application works on one machine, but not the other? We were running into this exact issue with a client and needed to see what was different between the operating systems on two machines. Thinking that the issue might have been a problem that got fixed in a hotfix/service pack, I whipped up the following PowerShell commands to get you the OS updates. I thought I'd share mainly so I wouldn't have to figure out how to write this again six months from now.

$updateSearcher = new-object -com "Microsoft.Update.Searcher"
$updateCount= $updateSearcher.GetTotalHistoryCount()
$updateSearcher.QueryHistory(0,$updateCount) | Sort-Object -Property Date | ForEach-Object { Write-Output $_.Date $_.Title }

 Edit: Sept. 10, 2010: Thanks for the comments, <blush>, I used the wrong variable name. All fixed now.

On Sep 9 2010 2:03 PMBy jrobbins
With 11 Comments John Robbins, powershell

Comments (11)

  2. David Gardiner

    I get the following error when I run that:

    Exception calling "QueryHistory" with "2" argument(s): "Exception from HRESULT: 0x80240007"
    At line:1 char:29
    + $updateSearcher.QueryHistory

  3. Erich Stehr

    May I recommend instead for that last line:

    $updateSearcher.QueryHistory(0,$updateCount) | Sort-Object -Property Date | Select-Object Date,Title

  4. Joakim Hanstad

    The last line should have been the following:
    $updateSearcher.QueryHistory(0,$updateCount) | Sort-Object -Property Date | ForEach-Object { Write-Output $_.Date $_.Title }
    where $totalUpdates are replaced by $updateCount

  5. Patrick Smacchia

    >Don't you love it when your application works on one machine, but not the other?

    A few months ago I wrote about all sorts of identified problems we had concerning that: Windows programming: The "it works on my machine" syndroma

    http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2010/04/06/windows-programming-the-quot-it-works-on-my-machine-quot-syndroma.aspx

  6. laurent

    Hello,

    nice script but there's a mistake:
    $updateSearcher.QueryHistory(0,$totalupdates) | Sort-Object -Property Date | ForEach-Object { Write-Output $_.Date $_.Title }

    => should use $updateCount instead of $totalUpdates

  8. Arnout

    Nice! One minor nitpick: in line 2 you're assigning to $updateCount, but in line 3 you're referring to it as $totalupdates.

  11. Dale

    on 2008 R2 I get the error message the same as Dave.

    Exception calling "QueryHistory" with "2" argument(s): "Exception from HRESULT: 0x80240007"

    Anyone got any ideas?

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