One of the 1st questions a tech will ask when they receive a support call is “When did you last reboot the pc”.  This is because Windows over time will lose more and more resources, which will cause the pc to “Run Slow” or have “Random errors” or “programs that don’t work anymore”, etc.  The non-technical explanation to what happens is that the computer gets “tired”. If you have ever stayed up all night (if you went out to clubs or parties, or stayed up studying for an exam) where you didn’t get any or very little sleep (less than an hour) before you had to start your normal day to day activities, how did (or would) you feel.  You would feel run down, not sharp, you would be slow and probably struggle doing even the most simple of tasks.  Well that is what happens to a pc that stays on for days on end.  So what do you do, if your the person lacking sleep, your probably looking for that “15 min cat nap” to try and make it to the end of your normal days activities.  Well for a computer it doesn’t need 15 or even 5 min.  A simple restart of the pc will refresh its memory and give the pc the rest its needs.  So now back to our story……..

    When I (or another tech) asks “When did you last reboot your pc”, we will get answers from “Oh I just rebooted” or “I don’t know it was on when I got here”, etc……

   As a tech it really helps to find the exact time that the pc has been running and this is a simple way of getting that information directly from the pc itself.

1 – Go to start –> Run –> and type CMD (Then click on OK)

2 – From the Command Prompt (That’s the black window with the blinking cursor window to some of you)

Type cd \ 

(There is a space between the cd part and the \ part) (Then hit enter)

3 – Now from where the cursor is type

net statistics workstation | find /i “statistics since” 

(After the word workstation is | which is called a pipe and is the character on the same keyboard button with the \ which is most likely above the  enter key and there is a space after i before the ” )

(Then hit enter and you will find the following info)

In this case it shows that the pc has been on since 9/1/2009 at 10:14 PM.  That way if the person says “we just rebooted”, you can double check and make sure.

Credit for this post goes to Julie @ thebackroom tech blog ( http://thebackroomtech.com/2009/09/01/find-windows-system-uptime-from-the-command-line/ (http://thebackroomtech NULL.com/2009/09/01/find-windows-system-uptime-from-the-command-line/) )