There are many reasons why you may want to know how many hours your PC has been running, such as to calculate its actual use before selling it on the second-hand market or to try to calculate the wear and tear on the components. Whatever your situation, in this article we are going to show you how to know how many hours your PC has been on in total.
When it comes to assessing the status of a PC, one that was bought two years ago that has been on for 8 hours a day every day is not the same as one that has had sporadic use and really has very few hours of use.
How to know how many hours of use your PC has
Really, PCs do not have a counter as such, and much less if at some point we have changed hardware, but there are several ways that can help us to know the age of the equipment in addition to the date of purchase.
With CrystalDisk Info
The simplest situation is if you have never changed hardware on your PC, and more specifically the storage unit, since hard drives and SSDs do have an internal counter for hours of use. If this is your situation then you have it easy because with programs like CrystalDisk Info we can see the number of hours that the storage units have been on and extrapolate that amount to the hours that the PC has been on.
In the screenshot above we can see the value “Hours on”, which in the example is an SSD that takes no less than 11,040 hours, which corresponds to 460 days of use. If in this case the PC had this SSD from the beginning and it has never been changed or removed, then we can know with certainty that the equipment has a use of more than 11,000 hours to date today.
With the Windows installation date
In this case, we will not be able to know the total number of hours that the PC has been on, but it can help us to get an idea because we can know exactly when the operating system was installed. If you have never formatted, then this data could be of great help to know the age of the PC.
To do this, simply open a Command Prompt console (Right click on the Start button -> Command Prompt) and type the following command:
systeminfo | find / i “install date” (or install date if you have it in English)
This information will also help you to know with certainty when was the last time you formatted the computer.
Actually, as we said at the beginning, it is difficult to know exactly how many hours a PC has been on because only the storage units have a counter that will show us that data, and therefore only if you have never changed the SSD or hard disk of your team can know the data exactly.
However, for many people this data can be very reliable because not everyone changes the storage unit of their computer, and even if they do so many times they reuse the unit that they have changed as a secondary device, so the data would remain valid.