Windows update is a feature available in Microsoft operating system that provides regular updates to all the Microsoft applications files to enhance the performance and user experience but some windows update might cause application issues after installing it, so here in this article we will guide you how to view and uninstall the installed windows update on your computer.
There are several ways to list out the hotfixes and patches that are installed in computer, the easiest and convenient way is either via by viewing it in control panel or through command line.
How to view installed windows update via control panel:
There are several ways to view installed windows update on your computer the easiest way is by viewing it via control panel
Please follow the below steps to view the installed windows update from control panel
- Go to start menu –> Search for Control panel –> Click System and Security –> Windows update –> Select View update history tab from right –> Click Installed updates that’s in top below the navigator.
There in the installed updates window we can sort and filter the installed updates based on Name, Program and Installed on date etc. for our quick reference.
We can even uninstall the patches via from installed updates view simply by selecting the particular patch and tapping the “uninstall” icon at the top to remove the installed windows update from our system.
View and export the installed windows update via command line:
WMIC stands for Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line is a utility and scripting interface that gives information about computer and allows us to perform various tasks on local as well on the remote windows computer.
To fetch the list of installed windows update on your computer just open the elevated command prompt [CMD] as administrator and type in the below listed commands
wmic qfe list
The above command will list all the installed updates in command prompt whereas if you would like to export it into text, excel CSV file or to HTML web document then just follow the below listed command.
wmic qfe list >filename.txt
wmic qfe list filename.csv
wmic qfe list full /format:htable > filename.htm
Where replace filename with custom names that you like to assign for exported file.
In few cases we will be searching for particular patch installation status then just follow the below command followed by the patch KB number to view the status.
wmic qfe list | find "KB304****"
View and export the installed windows update via Powershell:
Powershell is a scripting language that is developed by Microsoft to help windows users and IT administrators to automate the tasks through scripts and cmdlets. We can fetch and view the installed windows update through powershell too as we did in command line.
The below command is used to view the installed windows updates in Powershell console.
PS C:\> Get-HotFix
We can export output to text or excel csv file similar to WMIC by using the below command
Get-HotFix >filename.txt
Get-HotFix >filename.csv
We can even find the status of the particular patch by using the below command
Get-HotFix -id KB269****
Do you find any other ways to view the installed windows update that is missing here? Share with us in the comments session below.
