On 12/01/2017 10:01 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , T writes:
On 12/01/2017 08:33 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
T wrote:

A customer wanted to know how old his computer was.Â* He thought
maybe four years.Â* So I look for when Windows was installed.
It was over sever years.Â* Chuckle.

When was Windows installed:

Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* systeminfo | find /i "original"
Â*Only works if you never give up resolving a problem that a fresh OS
install will fix quicker.Â* At some point in troubleshooting a problem,
[]
I had to chuckle at a customer that always though her computers
were 1/3 as old as they were.Â* So I kept a spreadsheet and sent
it to her.Â* She started keeping it up herself.Â* And no longer
complained about why a 2 year old computer need to be replaced
after only 7 years.

:-)


Can modern motherboards, processors, disc drives, or other such
components be interrogated for a date - to within a couple of years,
anyway? (I don't know, I'm asking.) Video cards will probably show one
for a second or two when the computer starts, though that'd be the date
of its firmware, not the actual hardware, but again that ought to be
within a couple of years I'd have thought.

(If components can only be interrogated for serial number, there might
be databases somewhere online that lost serial numbers by date. I think
disc drives at least can be interrogated for these.)


I have seen it on Dell motherboards using one of their utilities.
They called it Birth Date or some such.

I don't see it show up on dmidecode (a Linux tool for system
information). It does give you the BIOS date, which is a
crude guess.

# dmidecode 3.1
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 2.7 present.
78 structures occupying 3132 bytes.
Table at 0x000EBFE0.

Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
Version: 2.00
Release Date: 05/09/2014
Address: 0xF0000
Runtime Size: 64 kB
ROM Size: 16 MB
Characteristics:
PCI is supported
BIOS is upgradeable
BIOS shadowing is allowed
Boot from CD is supported
Selectable boot is supported
BIOS ROM is socketed
EDD is supported
5.25"/1.2 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
3.5"/720 kB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
3.5"/2.88 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
Print screen service is supported (int 5h)
8042 keyboard services are supported (int 9h)
Serial services are supported (int 14h)
Printer services are supported (int 17h)
ACPI is supported
USB legacy is supported
BIOS boot specification is supported
Targeted content distribution is supported
UEFI is supported
BIOS Revision: 4.6