Windows update from powershell

There can be several reasons for not receiving the update: We may not have published the update yet. Our goal is to make the update available to Microsoft Update within two weeks of release, but there is no guarantee for that availability.

Make sure you have checked both checkboxes. Do a repair install using the MSI to ensure that both checkboxes are checked. There are group policy settings that control Microsoft Update. Your system administrator may have policies set that prevent you from using Microsoft Update. The checkbox in the installer cannot override the Group Policy. Submit and view feedback for This product This page. View all page feedback. The first thing that you need to do is install the module, this will require NuGet installed so if you haven't already got that make sure you do that.

How that the module is installed you'll want to check for updates on your server, that command is:. Once you've triggered the server to check for updates you'll want to install them, that command is:. You can add the -AcceptAll switch to allow the system to accept them without prompting you again. Now you can do the above on a machine to save you interfacing with the GUI or you can use it to schedule updates or even apply updates to remote machines.

It's worth checking out the help and examples within the module as it has some great advice. I've pulled together a quick script that can be used to deploy the module and pre-requisites and install the needed patches, you can find a copy here or below. Get the latest posts delivered right to your inbox.

Note: For the purposes of this blog, the last patch Tuesday was December I set the ApprovedStates property to NotApproved because I only want to see updates that are required by the clients that are not already approved for installation. This will tell the filter to look for only updates that are required by the clients, but have not been installed yet. This works fine for us because these updates are new to us and because we only want those for the most recent patch Tuesday.

First, I am going to show you the Administration Console and look at all updates that are required by the clients on the network since patch Tuesday. This is shown in the image that follows. Note the number of updates 30 and some of the titles listed here.

Although not all of the updates are listed in the image, I will show you a couple of methods that we can use to pull the exact same information by using Windows PowerShell! This method, as you can probably tell, will allow us to view the number of updates that are returned by using the previously configured Update Scope. I am going to expand on this slightly by using another method similar to one I showed you yesterday for the Computer Target Scope. This will return a little more information about the updates, as you will see.

That is pretty cool, but we want to see those updates as well. Sure enough, we can use the GetUpdates method and supply our Update Scope object to pull this information. And there you have it! You can compare the screenshots and you will see that the titles in the console match the titles from our query. Now I will show you how to view the update approvals by using the Update Scope object and the GetUpdateApprovals method.

To make this work and to provide some useful information, I will make a couple of adjustments to the existing Update Scope. This revision is shown here. Now we can use this scope in the method and pull some information. This technique is shown in the code that follows. Let us clean this up a little so it is more readable and not just a bunch of GUIDs.

The code that follows produces an easier to read output. The last two things I will show you in this blog are a couple of methods that require the Update Scope object and the Computer Target Scope object to work properly. They provide some nice reporting features similar to what you would see in the Administration Console. This method gets per-computer summaries for each of the specified computers, summed across all of the specified updates.

One thing you do not have available in the console is the DownloadedCount , which our previous code nicely displayed. The following code uses this method. Note: I changed the Update Scope to what I had at the beginning of this blog.

This is so I can more accurately compare the output here with what is in the Administration Console. Now compare the previous image, with the console shown here , and you will see that they match up as planned. So there you have it. This weekend I will talk about update 2.