As we all know that Windows installs updates for the operating system and other installed Microsoft products automatically whenever they become available. Usually, the updates are released on the first Tuesday of every month but Microsoft also releases some updates on the urgent basis whenever necessary.
We can see most of these updates that have been installed on our Windows PC from the Programs and Features section in the Control Panel. But it does not display information about all the installed updates and does not display when an updates had failed or whether it was reinstalled later. For viewing all of this information, we can make use of a third-party application called WinUpdatesView. This application is designed by the famed developer Nir Sofer.
WinUpdatesView is portable application just like all the other programs from Nir Sofer and it also has a similar user interface that uses a listbox view to display all the data. After we launch this program, it thoroughly analyzes the system and displays the entire history of operating system updates. It takes a little time before the list is populated but it varies from system to system. On our Windows 10 computer it took nearly hald a minute before it showed the details, while on our Windows 11 system it displayed everything instantly.
By default, this program loads the history of Windows updates from the local system using the Windows API. But we can make it read and analyze the database (DataStore.edb) directly. This file is located in C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore folder, but we can load this database file from any other location as well. For this, we have to make changes in the advanced settings of WinUpdatesView.
In the list of all the updates, we can see both the successfully installed updates and the failed updates. For each of the entries, we can see the tile, description, KB number, install date, update operation, operation result etc. We can export the entries to a TXT file or generate an HTML report from it.
You can download WinUpdatesView from https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/windows_updates_history_viewer.html.