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Old December 2nd 17, 12:43 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
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Default tip: when was windows installed

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. He thought
maybe four years. So I look for when Windows was installed.
It was over sever years. Chuckle.

When was Windows installed:

systeminfo | find /i "original"
Only works if you never give up resolving a problem that a fresh OS
install will fix quicker. 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. So I kept a spreadsheet and sent
it to her. She started keeping it up herself. 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.)


Silicon chips have a date code on top. It gives year and week.
That gives you a ballpark figure (approximate year).

Asus motherboards, the first two characters of the serial number
encode year and month. The warranty is measured from the birth
date, not the date on the sales slip. I have an Asus motherboard
here, which was sitting on a shop shelf for two years, leaving
only one year of warranty coverage left, out of a claimed
three year warranty.

The warranty can't be more than three years, because if the
product sat on the shelf, the CMOS battery would be dead. And
they'd have to mail out new batteries to people.

I haven't really run into info for other brands of
motherboards, and whether there is a reliable indicator.
BIOS codes could be flash upgraded, so if you're buying
used, you wouldn't really know when the motherboard
came out just looking at a BIOS date. I usually look
for review articles, to get some idea which century
stuff was made in. That gives an idea of the epoch.

As for the command T uses above, I was surprised to
learn my OS has a "find" command and a "findstr"
command, which perform the same function, but
have different available options. These are
similar to "grep". Weird, that they provide two
utilities like that.

Paul
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