Friday fun: Windows Feature Update progress

• Context

I started recently to launch some feature updates of Windows 10 in a scheduled task running as ‘NT AUTHORIY\SYSTEM’ account. It also means that the UI is hidden for whoever is logged on the computer.

I was also looking for some additional info about:
– how to detect that a feature is running
– how to detect that a feature has just finished running
– how to detect that a reboot is pending because of the feature update that just ran

• Solution

I started investigating using procmon.exe and tracked what’s written under HKLM\System\setup.

I noticed that I can track the progress of a feature update by using a one-liner:

While (ps setup* ) { Write-Progress -Activity Upgrade -PercentComplete "$((gp HKLM:\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup\Volatile -Name SetupProgress).SetupProgress)" -Status "at $((gp HKLM:\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup\Volatile -Name SetupProgress).SetupProgress)%" }

It appears that a SetupProgress value is written under the registry key HKLM:\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup\Volatile
Here’s a more readable splatted version of the one-liner:

While (Get-Process -Name setup*) {
 $k = 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup\Volatile'
 $n = 'SetupProgress'
 $p = Get-ItemProperty -Path $k -Name $n
 $HT = @{
  Activity =  'Upgrade'
  PercentComplete = "$($($p).$n)"
  Status = "at $($($p).$n)%"
 }
 Write-Progress @HT
}