Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of jxharding
jxharding

asked on

determine windows installation date

hi, im in an environment where i have to format and reload pc's regularly.
how can i find out when (what date) windows was installed on a machine?
my guess would be to look at some file dates ,but which?
i have posted on another site, but only received bad answers, with people taking wild guesses without checking
It's more for XP machines, but there are still a lot of 98 machines as well
thanks
SOLUTION
Avatar of wompey
wompey

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of wompey
wompey

BTW - The easiest way is just to run psinfo.exe from the command prompt.  It will show you the info without needing to use any switches.
Avatar of jxharding

ASKER

the utility is good thanks, it does the trick.

i just hope there is a remote possibility of using windows , or the registry just to get the date.

i'd like to bypass the psinfo copy procedure because for e.g. some of these pc's dont have any inputs like a stiffy drive or cdrom because the people screw around on the pc's then.

thanks
hmmm - if they're on a network, you can always just run it from your machine.

psinfo \\computername
yeah , that would be good, but higher entities forbid they come near the network.
there's gotta be a way that the program reads from the registry to get the value
ohhhh I see...    well it looks like there IS a way, but it's kind of messy.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/10225603/Registry-Installdate-format.html
(I got directed to that info from here https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/20533614/OS-Install-Date.html ).

Wow - I always forget to look here in the experts-exchange first.  Googling for that info didn't turn up much info at all, so I looked here.
SOLUTION
Avatar of Michael Pfister
Michael Pfister
Flag of Germany image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
-->"These pc's dont have any inputs like a stiffy drive or cdrom"

What about a usb flash drive?