OK, so this isn’t strictly SharePoint, but I have been bitten a few times lately by Microsoft patches, particularly those of the .NET variety. In both cases there were 2 problems that came up.

1. Looking through a list of updates by the KBXXXXXXXX number is difficult in the Windows Update GUI
2. There are a lot of updates, which makes it difficult to compare what is installed on two different machines.

My answer? It  isn’t exactly a quantum leap in PowerShell technology, but it is a script to list the installed Windows updates and the output can be easily directed to a text file so you can search it easily in notepad or compare it to the output from another machine.

$wu = new-object -com "Microsoft.Update.Searcher"
$updatecount = $wu.GetTotalHistoryCount()
$wu.QueryHistory(0,$updatecount)|select title

 

( add |out-file updatelist.txt  right after select title to dump all of the output into a text file for easy comparison.)

I hope this is a helpful snippet in your time of troubleshooting need!