I don't know how much work "psinfo" does, but at least for recent service packs, I think simply checking HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion//CSDVersion in the registry is enough. And Win32::TieRegistry makes checking this on a remote computer rather easy.

I recall Windows often taking a while to decide that the connection to a remote computer was going to fail, but I think that had more to do with my strange setup and some simple testing right now shows it taking only about 4 seconds to fail for me. So, if failures usually happen that fast, then something fairly simple will work: 

use Win32::TieRegistry( Delimiter=>"/" );
sub get_sp {
    my $cpu= shift @_;
    my $ver= $Registry->{"//$cpu/LMachine/Software/"
      . "Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion//CSDVersion"};
    if(  ! $ver  ||  $ver !~ /(\d+)/  ) {
        return "unknown";
    }
    return $1;
}

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        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: Dealing with timeouts using the Shell module by tye
in thread Dealing with timeouts using the Shell module by thunders

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