How in the Tech

What’s my Windows Uptime Anyways?

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 17, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Command Prompt, Windows

Uptime – the time your operating system has been up and running since the last power-cycle or reboot. In the earlier days of computing, uptime was everything. Unix admins would often brag about their multi-year uptime; while those limited to Windows may be lucky to make a day. It’s been the running joke or stereotype in the Unix vs Windows debates on supremacy. Things began to change in the Windows world around the release time of Windows 2000. Images of Blue Screens of Death that were burned into most users minds slowly faded. By the release of XP, the consumer oriented operating system from the NT/2000 lineage, BSODs were just about eliminated. It was at this point that I may argue system uptime stopped becoming relevant, at least as a bragging point.

Today, your Windows uptime is likely more constrained to the necessary reboot after applying Microsoft updates and not stability crashes. A fresh reboot doesn’t really keep a Windows machine peppy – so I just don’t think about it. Even still, you may be curious to find out your system uptime. Microsoft doesn’t make it entirely straightforward to uncover this information, but it does exist.

1. Bring up the Run dialog with Windows Key+R.
2. Launch a Command Prompt by typing cmd and clicking OK.



3. From Command Prompt, run the command systeminfo. The command takes a few minutes to gather all of the information necessary – not just the uptime. After a few moments the results will be displayed in the Command Prompt. You will likely have to scroll up to find a line titled System Boot Time. With a little bit of time-based math you can use today’s date and the system boot time date to determine the days, hours, minutes of your system uptime.