Internet Explorer version?

No updates for over a year, terrible! In my defence I have been very busy. My roles have moved away from being purely technical and now are primarily managerial / IT strategy / project management. That being said I do still like to get stuck in to some technical tasks every now and again.

A recent Intranet implementation project caused a mild panic at the last minute when it was discovered that one of the users was still using IE8…a contraption which unfortunately did not cope too well with our all-singing all-dancing responsive collaboration tool.

It turns out that despite IE11 being cleared for install in the WSUS server, some machines were not receiving the software due to its reliance on some non-critical updates. Super.

We then needed to quickly identify which machines were still stuck on a 6 year old browser.

So, how to check if you have IE11 installed? It’s not listed in Programs and Features, making the script I wrote to centrally dump this data for all machines (which I may share at another time) pretty useless.

I discovered a reg key that stores the version number. The reg key concerned is HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version (don’t bother to cross-check this with the versions listed at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/969393?wa=wsignin1.0 – my IE 11 install shows version 9.11.9600.17728 in the reg key, as long your version doesn’t start with an 8 you should be good).

I quickly whipped up this code to let us know what state we were in.

The code below relies on PSRemoteRegistry, which you can download from https://psremoteregistry.codeplex.com/

You will also need a text file with a list of all the machines you want to query.

Import-Module PSRemoteRegistry
$Date = get-date -format yyyyMMdd
$Output = New-Item -type file "C:\Scripts\IEversion-$date.log" -Force

Function LogWrite
{param([string]$logstring)
     Add-Content $Output -Value $logstring
}

$Computers = Get-Content -Path C:\Scripts\Machines\List.txt

FOREACH ($Computer in $Computers){
     IF (Test-Connection $Computer -quiet) {
          $RegValue = Get-RegValue -ComputerName $Computer -Key "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" -Value Version
          $IEVersion = $RegValue.Data
          LogWrite "$Computer has version $IEVersion"
     }
     ELSE
     {
          LogWrite "$Computer is down"
     }
}