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.