How to Check Windows Up Time To Know How Long Your PC Has Been Turned On

How to Check Windows UpTime To Know How Long Your PC Has Been Turned On

Ever wondered how you could know how long your machine, laptop or desktop PC, has been up, active or when it booted?

Method 1: Check Windows Up Time via Powershell

On your Windows PC, run Powershell as an Administrator, then run the following commands:

Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem | Select-Object LastBootUpTime

Get-WinEvent -ProviderName EventLog | Where-Object {$_.Id -eq 6005 -or $_.Id -eq 6006} | Select-Object -First 1 TimeCreated

(get-date) - (gcim Win32_OperatingSystem).LastBootUpTime

 

Method 2: Check Windows Up Time via Task Manager

You can alternatively check your PC’s uptime using the Task Manager utility. Search and open “Task Manager” or Run [Windows Button + R] taskmgr, to open the utility. Navigate to “Performance” then “CPU” which is the first tab. (Note:// Windows 11 or 10 have different layouts)

Look for  the text below the CPU performance graphs and check the duration your machine has been up under “Up time”. For my machine, that reads “0:14:44:15”, implying my machine has been up or booted 0 Days 14 Hours, 44 Minutes 15 Seconds and counting.

Method 3: Check Windows Up Time via Workstation Statistics

This method gets the uptime of a computer from its statistics log. This log usually initializes when a machine boots up, and that point of initialization is a timestamp from which you can know when a workstation powered up.

Open Command Prompt or Powershell and run the following command:

net stats Workstation

net statistics Workstation

Method 4: Check Windows Up Time via Event Viewer

The Event Viewer is a utility that logs any and all events in a Windows PC. Therefore, goes without saying, it initializes immediately the machine boots up, and logs its initialization as the first event. This implies that if you were to trace this event, you can easily tell when your PC turned on last.

To locate this event, you need to open the Event Viewer Utility/Program by either;

1. Searching and opening “Event Viewer” on your Windows Applications,
2. Right-clicking on the Microsoft Windows Start Button Icon and clicking on “Event Viewer”, or
3. Launching the “RUN” command utility, by simultaneously pressing Windows Button + R on your keyboard, then typing eventvwr and pressing OK or Enter/Return key on your keyboard.

   eventvwr

In the program, navigate to the left side where there is a panel with 4 tabs, “Custom Views“, “Windows Logs“, “Application and Services Logs“, and “Subscriptions“. Our interest is Windows Logs, so click on it to get 5 more tabs, “Application“, “Security“, “Setup“, “System” and “Forwarded Events“. Click on System and look for the panel on the right labeled “Actions“, under which we have “System” with many tabs under it. We want to Filter Current Log… so click on the option to get a pop up window. There are two tabs, and of interest is “Filter”, not “XML”. Of the many check-boxes and text-areas under Filter we have a text-area labeled “<All Event IDs>”. Click on it and type “6005” which is an Event ID of Information-Level logs that mark the starting of the “Event Log Service”. Click on OK to filter for all 6005 logs only. The first automatically selected event has a timestamp of when the event logging service was started, which is in-turn the time the machine finished booting. If you see an old log or several ones that are confusing, just  click on “Date and Time” tab to sort the events from the Newest.

As is visible on my screenshot, my server was powered up on “5/29/2026 8:31:36 PM“. (Look out for Logged in the “General” tab of the specific 6005 event)

Method 5: Check Windows Up Time via Command Prompt

You can also trace the uptime of your PC from several commands on CMD (they’ll also run on PS) as shown below. These commands specifically query for the Last Boot Up Time, which translates to when the machine was last powered up.

wmic os get lastbootuptime

systeminfo | find "System Boot Time"

Method 6: Check Windows Up Time via Network Adapter Information

The last method to check when your machine was last powered up is from your Network Adapter. Although it takes sometime to connect to a network and thus log the time of connection, your network adapter can give you a pretty good idea of when your PC finished booting. This is however dependent on, availability of a network connection, VPN connectivity, as well as the speed of your machine. The network adapter you are checking has to have been running throughout the uptime session, and it definitely shouldn’t have been reset for the same session.

To get to Network Adapter settings, either;

1. Search for “Network” on your Microsoft Windows Applications, and click on Network status, then scroll down or navigate to Change adapter options, and click on it to bring up a Control Panel window labelled “Network Connections”,
2. Open Settings and navigate to “Network & Internet” then click on either “Status“, “Wi-Fi“, “Ethernet“, “Dial-up“, “VPN” or “Mobile hotspot“, then scroll down or navigate to Change adapter options, and click on it to bring up a Control Panel window labelled “Network Connections”.

Once you are on that window, double-click on a network adapter that is connected to the internet. if you have many internet adapters like me, open them all and check the time counter under “Duration“. Basically, the more the duration when you compare several adapters, the more accurate it is. For instance, my VPN’s duration was 1 Minute behind my Ethernet’s duration. (NOTE::// This is the only method that doesn’t give you the accurate uptime)

How to Check Windows Up Time To Know How Long Your PC Has Been Turned On
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