How to Find Out the Date and Time When Windows was Installed in Your Computer?

There are many ways to check Windows installation date and time as mentioned below:

• METHOD 1: Using Windows Explorer
• METHOD 2: Using SystemInfo Command in Command Prompt
• METHOD 3: Using WMIC Command in Command Prompt
• METHOD 4: Using Registry Editor

If you also want to find out install date and time of Windows in your system, here are the details of these methods:

METHOD 1: Using Windows Explorer

This method is the easiest method to have an approximate idea of date and time of Windows installation.

1. Open Windows Explorer and go to the drive containing the installed operating system. Generally its C: drive in most of the systems.

2. Now either change the folder view type to details or right-click on a folder such as Program Files or Windows and select Properties.

3. It'll open folder properties window. Here you can see the folder created date and time. Its almost the same date and time when Windows was installed in your computer.

But there is a slight problem in this method. Since Windows Vista release, Microsoft changed theinstallation type of Windows to image based which means the setup installer just extracts the required files to your hard drive. So many times the date and time of folder creation will not be the installation date and time of Windows but it'll be the date and time when Microsoft created the Windows image for the setup.

But there is a workaround for this problem! You can check out the folder creation date of youruser account folder which is present in "Documents and Settings" or "Users" folder.

Since this folder is created by Windows setup at the time of installation, its creation date and time will be almost the same as of Windows installation.

METHOD 2: Using SystemInfo Command in Command Prompt

The above mentioned method might not provide the exact and correct date and time of Windows installation but you can use following Command Prompt method to get the original date and time when Windows was installed:

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator using any method given here.

2. Now run following command:

systeminfo

It'll take a few seconds in running some tests and you'll get a detailed information in the result.

3. Scroll upwards a little and look for "Original Install Date" section. It'll show the correct date and time of Windows installation in your system.

You can also take help of '|' parameter to direct find and show the Windows installation date and time via systeminfo command.

Just run following command in Command Prompt:

systeminfo | find /i "date"

It'll only show the Windows installation date and time information.

METHOD 3: Using WMIC Command in Command Prompt

There is another command "WMIC" (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) which can be used to find out Windows installation date and time.

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator using any method given here.

2. Now run following command:

WMIC OS GET installdate

It'll immediately show the install date and time of Windows in following format:

Year Month Date Hour Minutes Seconds

For example following is the result of the above mentioned command in our test:

20131019011658

Here:

2013(year) 10(month) 19(date) 01(hour) 16(minutes) 58(seconds)

METHOD 4: Using Registry Editor

You can also take help of Windows Registry to find out the date and time of Windows installation but it'll be little bit complicated method.

Interested people can follow these steps to check the install date and time of Windows in Registry Editor:

1. Type regedit in RUN dialog box and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

3. In right-side pane, look for InstallDate DWORD value.

4. This DWORD contains total number of seconds since 1st January 1970. You'll need to perform some mathematics calculations to find out the date and time information from the given number of seconds.

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That's it. If you know about any other method to calculate or find Windows installation date and time, feel free to share it in your comment...

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