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I will buy a used PC and I want to know how many hours the PC has worked.

I have already found :

  • systeminfo | findstr /C:"Install Date"
  • systeminfo | findstr /C:"BIOS Version"

but I need to know how many hours the PC has worked (used)

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  • 6
    There is no way to get that information.
    – Sami Kuhmonen
    Sep 7, 2015 at 18:05
  • 11
    for the hard drive, you can read the S.M.A.R.T. attributes (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.). Attribute #09 is Power-On Hours. Be careful if the drive is pre-2005, as the value may be erratic or incorrect.
    – njzk2
    Sep 7, 2015 at 20:07
  • @njzk2 I would amend that as follows: "Be careful if the drive is pre-2005." That would be a minimum of ten years old, on the far edge of the bathtub graph of HDD mortality.
    – user76225
    Sep 8, 2015 at 0:31
  • This very much depends on what exactly you're looking to measure, and what assurances you have about the PC's build history. For example, the HDD measurements suggested in some answers are no good to you if the HDD was replaced before selling the PC to you. (A common security measure, especially for businesses.) Also, time of usage alone is not necessarily an accurate measure of the wear and tear on a machine - 24 hours of 100% CPU usage is very different from 24 hours of idling. And the "Install Date" from systeminfo is no good if the OS has been reloaded at any time.
    – Iszi
    Sep 30, 2015 at 20:28
  • The BIOS Version from systeminfo is also not useful for your metrics. Most likely, any date gathered from there will be well before the PC was ever first booted - in fact, it could even be well before the motherboard was actually built. If previous owners kept the BIOS up to date though, then the date will be well after the system's first boot.
    – Iszi
    Sep 30, 2015 at 20:33

2 Answers 2

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20

You can use a software like CrystalDiskInfo to get the "Power on hours" of the hard drive.

Just keep in mind that the HDD may have been replaced and thus be newer than the PC.

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  • Note: This assumes that you're either only interested in the HDD's usage history, or 100% confident that the HDD in the system now is the same one the system was originally built with.
    – Iszi
    Oct 1, 2015 at 14:15
  • And that the drive was not recycled from a previous build.
    – Hennes
    Apr 16, 2019 at 18:43
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If the computer has a computer which has been used from scratch with the computer you can check the hours used on the monitor with the ddcutil command. first you need to find if the monitor has that capability by the command

sudo ddcutil capabilities

if it has it will be something like Feature 0C (display usage time) and you could get the information by the command

sudo ddcutil getvcp 0C

and it will tell you how many hours it has been on. getvcp is used for getting info from the computer. you can also do some cool stuff with ddcutil like setting the brightness and so on without touching the monitor.

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