If you are a Windows Insider, upgrading your Windows 10 computer seems to be a pretty frequent thing to do these days. Are you curious about how far you have gone with Windows 10 and how many upgrades you have committed?
Turns out, Windows keeps the upgrade history right in the Windows Registry. Open Registry Editor, head over to the following location,
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup
And check the Source OS key and browse through the data stored under each key separated by an installation date to find out about the currently or previously installed versions or builds and editions of Windows.
To get a clean look at the upgrade history, let’s try the PowerShell. Thanks to ghacks.net for the trick.
Open Windows PowerShell window and run the following two cmdlets.
PS > $AllBuilds = $(gci "HKLM:\System\Setup" | ? {$_.Name -match "\\Source\s"}) | % { $_ | Select @{n="UpdateTime";e={if ($_.Name -match "Updated\son\s(\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}\s\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})\)$") {[dateTime]::Parse($Matches[1],([Globalization.CultureInfo]::CreateSpecificCulture('en-US')))}}}, @{n="ReleaseID";e={$_.GetValue("ReleaseID")}},@{n="Branch";e={$_.GetValue("BuildBranch")}},@{n="Build";e={$_.GetValue("CurrentBuild")}},@{n="ProductName";e={$_.GetValue("ProductName")}},@{n="InstallTime";e={[datetime]::FromFileTime($_.GetValue("InstallTime"))}} }; PS > $AllBuilds | Sort UpdateTime | ft UpdateTime, ReleaseID, Branch, Build, ProductName
Basically, the first command is to retrieve the Source OS info from the registry and save them in a variable named $AllBuilds Then call up the variable in the second command with the sort option to UpdateTime property.
The information could be useful and handy to quickly reveal whether a Windows 10 system was upgraded from Windows 7 or 8.1, or a clean install like the one above.
Mine only holds 2 updates. Quite possibly the Creators Update and the Fall Creators Update. The thing is that this computer was using Windows 7 before that and it’s not listed anywhere. Strange.
hmmm…maybe you’ve used tools like CCleaner at one point that cleaned up the registry?
Nah I don’t think I did. But I did delete all of my previous Windows versions from the drive.