Developed by NirSoft, WinUpdateView is a free portable tool that displays the history of Windows updates ever installed on your computer since day 1. It loads the Windows updates history from your local system, using API, and it can also read and parse the Windows updates database file (datastore.edb) from an external drive or from a remote computer on your network.
Like many other NirSoft tools, WinUpdatesView is portable so it doesn’t require any installation process or additional DLL files. Download the tool and simply double-click the executable you will get the Windows Updates history in a couple of seconds.
You can save the result in a variety of formats, CSV, tab-delimited, HTML5, XML, even JSON files.
To load the Windows Update history from a remote computer, go to Options and click Advanced Options.
Select Remote Computer from the list, type in the computer name, and click OK.
The result will come up quite instantly. And in order to pull the history from a remote computer, you need full admin access with the admin share.
To get the history off an external hard drive that has Windows system previously installed, load the database file from the following location:
Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb
The tool works on any version of Windows, from Windows XP and all the way up to Windows 10. Both 32-bit and 64-bit systems are supported. What’s even better, you can run it as a command-line and maybe put it as part of your batch script.
Now with this tool handy, I will use it next time when I need to check if a particular update is installed on any of the computers on my network.