Identifying Your Windows Version with PowerShell

PowerShell is a powerful command-line shell and scripting language available on Windows systems. A common task for system administrators and developers is to determine the version of Windows a system is running. This tutorial will guide you through several methods of achieving this using PowerShell.

Using the .NET Framework

The .NET Framework provides access to operating system information through the System.Environment class. The OSVersion property contains detailed information about the Windows version. Specifically, the Version property gives you the major, minor, build, and revision numbers.

[System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version

This will output a series of numbers representing the Windows version. For example:

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
6      1      7601   65536

This indicates Windows 7. You can interpret these numbers to determine the specific Windows release.

Leveraging WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)

WMI is a core component of Windows that provides a standardized way to manage and retrieve information about the system. You can use PowerShell to query WMI classes to get the Windows version.

(Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption

This command retrieves the Caption property from the Win32_OperatingSystem class, which provides a human-readable string describing the operating system. For example:

Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

Note: For newer versions of PowerShell based on cross-platform .NET (pwsh), use Get-CimInstance instead of Get-WmiObject:

(Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption

Determining Windows 10 Specific Versions

Windows 10 introduces a more granular versioning system beyond the standard major and minor numbers. Each major feature update receives a unique identifier.

To retrieve this identifier, you can access the ReleaseId value from the registry:

(Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion").ReleaseId

This will output a string like 10.0.19041.1706 which identifies a specific Windows 10 build. You can also query the registry using cmd:

Reg Query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion" /v ReleaseId

Using `Get-ComputerInfo`

PowerShell provides the Get-ComputerInfo cmdlet which consolidates a wealth of system information, including the Windows version.

Get-ComputerInfo | select WindowsProductName, WindowsVersion, OsHardwareAbstractionLayer

This will output information similar to:

WindowsProductName    WindowsVersion OsHardwareAbstractionLayer
------------------    -------------- --------------------------
Windows 10 Enterprise 1709           10.0.16299.371

Accessing File Version Information

For the most detailed versioning, including the build number, you can query the version information of a system file, such as hal.dll.

(Get-ItemProperty -Path "C:\windows\system32\hal.dll").VersionInfo.FileVersion

This often returns a string that looks like:

10.0.10240.16392 (th1_st1.150716-1608)

This provides the most comprehensive version identifier, including the build and a codename for the release.

Choosing the Right Method

The best method to use depends on the level of detail you require:

For a quick, human-readable name: (Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption
For major/minor/build/revision numbers: [System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version
For Windows 10 specific Release IDs: (Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion").ReleaseId
For the most detailed version information: (Get-ItemProperty -Path "C:\windows\system32\hal.dll").VersionInfo.FileVersion
For a consolidated view of multiple properties: Get-ComputerInfo | select WindowsProductName, WindowsVersion, OsHardwareAbstractionLayer