How to tell windows version from files on a remote system?

Based on https://superuser.com/questions/363018/how-do-i-tell-what-version-and-edition-of-windows-is-on-the-filesystem you can know how to tell Windows Version from files and Service pack in C:WindowsSystem32license.rtf for Windows 7. For Windows XP the information is in C:WindowsSystem32eula.txt. For Windows 10 licenses.rtf does not contain the version. Instead it contains the EULA code, which you can use to find the version online.

  I tested this on XP SP3, 7, 7 SP1, and 10 and found that this works for each OS.

The current language pack is a little more tricky. You can find what appears to be the currently available languages in C:WindowsSystem32. The folders are in the format of xx-XX (xx = language, XX = country). For example en-US is English-United States, es-MX is Spanish-Mexico.

The packs that have been used are copied to C:Windows.

To test this I switched my Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 10 Pro machines over to es-MX and, once I rebooted the computer, found that the es-MX folder was created in C:Windows. Unfortunately the en-US was still there making the current language ambiguous. However you should be able to use the combination of active packs and the names of Documents, Photos, Music ect. to get the current language.

I was unable to test this in XP as I could not risk bricking my last running example of XP.