How in the Tech

Determining When Windows was Installed

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 23, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Command Prompt, Windows

Here’s a tip you may find useful – how can you quickly determine when your copy of Windows was installed? I have a friend from college that used to religiously reinstall Windows at least once a semester. This was during the Windows 98 days when the notion of bit-rot was common place. Bit rot was basically the term coined that describe the behavior of Windows after it had been used for awhile; the system began to slow to a crawl or generally become unstable. The assumed logic was that important Window files would slowly age and become corrupt. Obviously this sounds silly today, and it did then too. But few could argue that fresh feeling you’d encounter with a new install of Windows. It tend to cure all that ailed your PC too. Now, those days have basically past us by, but many still have that habit of reinstalling at least once a year.

There are likely other reasons it may be handy to know the install date of Windows but on with the quick tip.

Open a Command Prompt by going to Start->Run and typing cmd.

From the command prompt type systeminfo | find /i “install date” and hit enter. You should receive your answer shortly.

systeminfo can return a lot of useful information which I’ve hidden by piping the output of the command to find. This is similar in nature to the grep functionality in Unix.