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How to find out when Windows is installed. Where to see the Windows installation date

Hello friends. How to find out when Windows was installed? We may need such information when, for example, we are weighing the options - tinkering with finding a solution to a problem or reinstalling Windows just to be sure. The choice of the latter option can be facilitated by the old installation date of the system. Another example is when we buy a PC, laptop or tablet on the secondary market, and the seller swears to us that the device is new or has low mileage. If suddenly the date Windows installations will indicate a much higher mileage than stated; with skillful bargaining, this fact can be used to reduce the price. How can you find out this information?

1. AIDA64

The well-known AIDA64 program is a Must Have tool if we go to look at a used computer. It should be one of the first programs on board a Live disk recorded on a flash drive, which we must have with us in such situations. Installation date and time Windows program shows in the section " operating system", in the "Operating time" subsection, this is the "First boot time" parameter.

In addition, AIDA64 in the same subsection will show us other interesting things about an unfamiliar device:

Total operating and downtime,

The most for a long time work and downtime,

Number of reboots, etc.

2.Speccy

The Speccy program from Piriform (the parent of CCleaner) is consumer-grade software, but nevertheless it is a very good diagnostic program. It displays information about components, shows the temperature of individual components, and provides the ability to record diagnostics. specific device in snapshot files. In its “Operating System” section we will see the date and time of installation of Windows.

You may need to look at the Windows installation date when buying or selling a computer, or just out of idle curiosity. Knowing the installation date of the operating system, you can determine whether the seller is deceiving you, claiming that “this is a fresh Windows, I just installed it yesterday!”

I suggest two reliable way in order to find out the installation date of Windows XP and Windows 7. This process is the same on both OSes. Therefore, I will not attribute this article to any specific system.

The whole process is very simple and takes a couple of minutes.

Via command line

Before you can find out the Windows installation date, you need to run the command line. This is done by clicking on the “Start” button and then “Run”. Or you can use the combination Win+R. In the window that opens, write cmd and click “OK”.

The command line will appear. In it, in order to find out the installation date of Windows 7 or XP, you need to write systeminfo after the welcome messages and press the “Enter” key. It may take some time for the request to be processed, and then you will see information about your computer.

In this list you need to find the line “Install date:”, and there you will see when Windows was installed for you: the day and time of installation. There is also a lot of other interesting information here.

Via the registry

The Windows registry is the holy of holies of the operating system. Everything is here, including the installation date of Windows.

Yes, this method of looking at the installation date of Windows is, of course, sophisticated and complicated, but still, it’s a method! And this, so to speak, is the primary source of information. This method Find out the installation date Windows is also suitable for XP and Seven.

Thinking about how to find out the Windows installation date, you may be struck by the idea that you can look at the properties of the Windows directory and the creation date will contain what we are looking for. Yes, this method is simpler and it does work, but you can’t really rely on it. Sometimes the date here may not correspond to the actual installation. For example, on my computer the difference is about a day.

There are also many more third party software who provide such information, they receive it from the registry.

If you have a computer on which Windows is installed, you are unlikely to just want to know the installation date of the operating system, unless you are an overly curious subject. However, some users actually show active interest, wanting to clarify the date when the operating system was installed. In principle, such curiosity may have good reasons.

How can you find out the exact date and time of Windows installation.

In particular, purchasing computer equipment not in the store, but from your hands, you take a certain risk, completely trusting what he says previous owner PC. However, his words can be verified at least partially. Wanting to sell a computer at a higher price, many begin to lie about the “age” of the computer. You can see when Windows was installed. Having this information, you can roughly determine when the period of direct use of the equipment begins to be calculated.

Certainly, former owner can use a trick and reinstall Windows, in which case the date will change. Unfortunately, with this approach, it will be impossible to determine the exact date when the computer was purchased and the operating system was first installed.

So, if you are driven by curiosity, if you really want to find the answer to the question of how to find out the installation date of Windows 10, we will help you by listing several successful ways to solve this problem. These methods are varied and are based on the use of only operating system tools, as well as some programs.

Using a conductor

If you are a user who cannot yet boast of excellent computer skills, and therefore is once again afraid of doing something at random or infiltrating the “holy of holies of the PC,” we recommend resorting to the simplest and in a safe way determining the installation date of the operating system.

Open "Computer", go to drive C, find Windows folder. Without going into it, click on it once right key mice. As a result of such actions, an additional menu will open, in which you can easily find the “Properties” option. After you click on it, a small information window will open in which the date will be indicated. It can indicate when the OS was installed.

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to judge this with such confidence. All new Windows versions, starting with Vista, will tell you wrong date. What you see using this method will be the creation date.

Based on this, you better open drive C, go to the “Users” folder, then select your name, and after that right-click on it. Now information will appear that you can completely trust, since such folders are created only when installing a new operating system.

Using the command line

If you reject the ease of completing any tasks, then we suggest you use a method that orients you to using the command line. Initially clamp two Win keys and R. Now that a window has appeared on the screen, enter the SystemInfo command into it.

A tab will appear on the screen in which you can find the answer to your question. From the appeared text information You can also glean other useful information.

ADVICE. If you are experiencing a time limit, you do not have time to select the part of the data that you need, you can type “SystemInfo | find /i [date]". In this case, only the date and exact time operating system installation.

You can also enter the following command: “WMIC OS GET installdate”, but only in this case will the screen display digital dialing. Don't be alarmed, it is this digital set that indicates the date and time of OS installation. The first four digits indicate the year, the next two indicate the month, then the day. All subsequent digits indicate hours, minutes and seconds precise installation Windows.

Using the Registry Editor

On the left side there will be registry branches, you will have to follow some of them. Start your journey by clicking on the Software folder, then in the list that opens, go to Microsoft string, then switch to Windows NT, finally going to the CurrentVersion line. Now pay attention to left side open window. Carefully examine the entire list, try to find the InstallDate line. It is this parameter that will be accompanied numerical value, indicating how many seconds passed from January 1, 1970 until the operating system was installed.

Of course, you'll have to remember school course mathematics, convert it into the number of years, months and days, and only then clarify for yourself exactly when Windows was installed on this computer. We understand that this method is used much less often if they want to find out the installation date of the OS, but we still bring it to your attention, since some users really want to have information about all existing methods, even the most “exotic” ones.

So, as you can see, there are several ways in which you can get exact information when Windows was installed on the PC. It will also be possible to determine the “age” of a computer in this way if the owner was previously unable or unwilling to change the installed OS.

Before we talk about how to find out the installation date of Windows (whether it is Windows 7 or Windows XP), I propose to speculate about why, in principle, you might need information about the installation date of Windows. Off the top of my head I came up with a few reasons:

  • If you buy a used computer and the seller says that he has never reinstalled the system, then the approximate age of the computer can be obtained by finding out the date the OS was installed.
  • Many Windows users For preventive purposes, they prefer to reinstall the system once a year or every two years, thereby radically getting rid of system garbage And unnecessary programs. Finding out the date last installation Windows, you can estimate when you need to reinstall it next time.
  • You can expose an unscrupulous seller who is trying to sell an old one under the guise of a new computer (and who did not have the intelligence to clean the system)
  • Ordinary curiosity

You can find out the Windows installation date using various built-in system tools; I tried to select universal ones that will work in Windows XP and Windows 7.

1) Team systeminfo

The systeminfo.exe command contains a number of useful information about the system, including the date of installation of Windows. Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and type systeminfo.

As you can see, you can find out the Windows installation date by reading the value in the line Original Install Date, in my case the system was installed on 01/28/2011, 14:04:14

To avoid printing an unnecessary command, you can use the find command to display only information about the system installation date:

Systeminfo | find /i "install date"

Using the systeminfo command, you can determine the installation date of both Windows 7 and Windows XP; it works correctly in all OSes.

2) The second option for determining when your Windows OS is installed is to use the WMI command wmic, to do this, type in the command line:

Wmic os get installdate

Once prompted, the Windows installation date will be displayed. You can convert the date to a more readable form using the PowerShell command

PS C:\> ("").ConvertToDateTime((Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).InstallDate)

By the way, we have already used the syteminfo and wmic commands to view all installed Windows updates.
3) Information about the installation date of Windows can also be obtained from system registry. To do this, open the following branch in the Registry Editor: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion and find a REG_DWORD type parameter named InstallDate, in my case it is 1296201854.

As you can see, this value does not look like a date at all, the reason is that the system installation date in the registry is stored in Unix time format (a 32-bit value indicating the number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC). To convert Unix time format to more convenient format, type the following PowerShell command:

PS C:\> ::CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(("1/1/1970").AddSeconds($(get-itemproperty "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion").InstallDate))

This is where the methods known to me that help answer the question “How to find out the installation date of Windows” have ended. If you know alternatives to this method, share them in the comments, I will be happy to add to this list.

In today's article, I will tell you where you can get information about the installation date of Windows on your PC. I'll show you how to look this information using our own Windows tools where it can be found in third party applications or programs.

Why is information about when Windows was installed even useful? Well, of course, each user can pursue their own goal for this, but most often this goal is ordinary curiosity.

Also, some system administrators, in this way, when performing computer maintenance, determine whether Windows was installed long ago and it’s time to reinstall it or not. In general, I think that everyone will determine for themselves why they might need it. Well, we will proceed directly to performing the necessary actions that will help us find out the installation date.

Find out the Windows installation date using the system's own tools

I won't describe everything here possible options, in which you will have to calculate something yourself or look for necessary information It’s unclear where. Instead, three of the most, as it seems to me, will be considered simple options, who can give a comprehensive answer to the question about the date of installation of Windows.

Method No. 1

Of course, the most the easy way determining the Windows installation date, the easiest way is to use command line. Accordingly, first we need to launch it using dialog box“Run” by entering the “cmd” command there or running it through the “Start” menu, and also, if you are using Windows 10, you can run it from context menu, right-click on the Start icon.

Now, as for running as administrator, I was able to get all the information I was interested in about installing the system by running “cmd” in normal mode so that you can try this first, and then, if necessary, run it with suspended rights.

In the command line window that loads, type or copy this: “ systeminfo", confirming the execution by pressing "Enter".

After a few seconds of collecting information, information about your system should appear on the screen, including the date of its installation. For example, I have this: “ 09.12.2016 ", usually given line is on the tenth line, or somewhere in this area.

If you want to get confused and want only date information to be displayed on the screen, then you will have to do the following command:systeminfo | find "Date of installation" .

After which only one line will appear below, in which the phrase “installation date” was mentioned, and the number displayed with right side, opposite this line is the very date of installation of the system.

Method No. 2

This method is probably even simpler than the previous one, but it is number two because there may be an error of several minutes or seconds in the date it displays, it may not even be, but most likely it is, but still probably easier way can not found.

So, let's go to " My computer» — « Disk C:» — « Users" Here we find the folder with your user and calling it “ Properties».

In the " Are common", find the line " Created", opposite which the date and time of its creation will be indicated. That is, this is the creation date of the user folder itself, but usually given value matches or is close to the system installation date.

Let's look at my example, based on the data received in systeminfo, we can say that Windows was installed on 12/09/2016 21:09:47, but the folder was created on 12/09/2016 21:09:52. As you can see, the difference is literally 5 seconds.

In general, although there is an error, it is not at all large, so that I think we can safely rely on the data obtained in this way.

Method No. 3

The third option is to use third party program. In principle, today information on the system installation date can be viewed in any utility or program that can display information about the system or computer characteristics.

But, since I most often use Aida64, I will show an example of where to look for the necessary installation information, using this tool.

After downloading the program, install it and launch it. In the Aida64 interface window, using navigation menu, select the item “ operating system " Afterwards, in the information window, which is located on the right side, all information about the installed OS will be displayed, as well as exact date when Windows was installed.

True, you can only find out the date, so if you need a specific time in addition to the date, then I recommend paying attention to one of the methods described above.

I think this will be enough to find out information about when Windows was installed on your computer. If you have any ideas or questions regarding this article, then leave them in the comments, and I will definitely answer them.