Managing and rolling out Windows updates can take a significant amount of your time. Luckily, Windows includes features that can streamline installation, configure file locations, and quickly determine the currently installed OS version, thus reducing your Windows administrative burden. The following tips explain how you can gain better control of your service packs and hot fixes by using slipstreaming and managing the file locations. You can use slipstreaming to automatically roll service packs into Windows installations so that every new install is automatically updated to the latest version. Configuring the locations of the files allows you to download updates to a single location and have Windows locate them automatically. Which version?
Before updating a Windows system, you'll often need to know which service pack is currently installed. You can find this information in Windows in a number of ways. In Windows 2000 and XP, the easiest way to determine which service pack is installed is to look on the System Properties General tab, which displays the build number as well as the service pack version. Another option for finding this information is to run Winver. Winver displays the Windows build and service pack information in a pop-up window as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

Winver shows system information. Perform the following steps to run Winver:

1. Click Start | Run.
2. In the Open box, type Winver.
3. Click OK or press Enter.

You can also access this dialog box in Windows Explorer by choosing Help | About Windows from the menu bar. Winmsd.exe will also report this information (see Figure B). Follow the steps listed above, but type Winmsd to view system data. Notice that Winmsd displays more detailed information about your system but reports the same version data.

Figure B

Winmsd displays more detailed system information. You can also obtain this information from the command prompt if you have the Reg.exe utility from Supplement 2 of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. Reg.exe can pull service pack information from the registry. The version data is stored in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Windows NT \CurrentVersion \CSDVersion. You can query this value with Reg.exe to find out exactly which service pack version is installed. It can also reveal whether the installed service pack is a beta or release candidate and display that version information as well.