Possible to find original Windows installation date through multiple major version upgrades?

[NervousEnergy]

My google-fu is failing me, or maybe this just isn't possible. I hate fresh installing Windows, and always have - it's enormously time consuming given all the stuff I do with my PC, so I always have just upgraded, going all the way back to XP. Chipset changes, GPU brand changes, CPU changes, complete HW refreshes... never re-installed. I even switched HALs without re-installing back when I got my first quad core. I'm pretty sure the live Windows version on my PC right now was originally installed at least back in the W7 days, and quite possibly XP.

I was reminded of this last week when I was looking in my Events viewer trying to figure out why a joystick was disconnecting, and saw a ton of critical Failed Tasks going back... a long way. Turned out it was a Windows Media Center update task that had last successfully run in 2012.... it had been failing multiple times a day since then.

Is there any way to determine the very first original installation date for Windows? Google just brings up the sysinfo command, and it shows the date of the last major update pack as the 'original' installation date which was 6 months ago. My oldest 'last run' entry in Task Scheduler is 2012, and I don't think it tracks first run. Created Dates on Windows folders all point to April 2024 when I moved the C partition to a newer SSD. Some registry entry, perhaps?

 

[continuum]

Does systeminfo show?

 

[LordDaMan]

This dell support page had an interesting way to check the install date of windows:

If you didn't replace your hard drive where windows is located, check the properties of c:\windows folder and look at creation date

 

[NervousEnergy]

Does systeminfo show?

Tried that - shows May of this year. The W10 to W11 upgrade was years ago - I think May was when I replaced the system SSD. That may have forced Windows to revalidate the license automatically and reset the install date. No idea, really.

If you didn't replace your hard drive where windows is located, check the properties of c:\windows folder and look at creation date

Lol... the drive's been replaced half a dozen times via cloning (Macrium) since the Windows 7 days. It's had new hardware, partition resizing, and even partition upgrades (MBR to GPT) since the original Windows installation, whenever that was. The creation dates on all the folders have been replaced many times, unfortunately.

No, if the information is in there somewhere it's likely going to be a registry entry, or perhaps an old text log. Just not sure how to find it.

 

[LordDaMan]

There's a registry entry but

1. It's in Unix time format for some strange reason (seconds since jan 1, 1970)
2. The same date as systeminfo

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On side note, the systeminfo date is the date of the last major upgrade that required reinstall. So basically any of the major windows 11 updates as they reinstall windows in the background.

 

[LordDaMan]

OK, then let's narrow down different way

You said the original had XP on it right? Did it have media center also? If it had media center, who made it?

 

[Whittey]

Try something similar to Dell's suggestion with a file that's unlikely to have been modified. %windir%\win.ini or %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\networks

 

[LordDaMan]

Win.ini gets changed and updated. On my system the date is 11/2/2023. The only problem is I got the computer late march/early April Iin 2023

 

[Whittey]

What in the world is touching your win.ini? Jebus. Mine still says 2018, as do a couple files in my system32/drivers/etc/.

 

[LordDaMan]

No idea. Systsem.ini is s 6/5/2001, which is older than the entire computer is (the cpu didn't even exist then!) and the same age a some of the files in system32/drivers/etc/.

 

[NervousEnergy]

File system dates on Windows are pretty much worthless - too many things can affect them or even preserve them. I've been looking at log files, and there's some good candidates there. I have an Office 2010 installation with install log files in January of 2011 - actual dates in the log, and not file system dates. Also have an Explorer 9 install log with internal dates from May 2011 in System32, and a Java installation log with entry dates from April 2010 in SysWOW64.

There's a ton of 2009 date items in System32's various folders, consistently set at June 6, 2009, which may have been an original Windows installation date, but these are file system dates, not internal dated writes like the log files.

 

[Da Xiang]

On my system, The system.ini and win.ini files match the dates of my last clean install as well as the Goup Policy Users folder in cwindows\system32. Also in cusers\public, the folders: Public Downloads, Public Music, Public Pictures, and Public videos all show the same date.

 

[BigLan]

Did the Public folders exist in XP, or did they get introduced in Vista?

 

[LordDaMan]

Don't think xp have public folders, but it did have a shared documents folder for all users

 

[bkaral]

What about setup.log? Would it still contain the original install date?

 

[AnonymousCward]

How about the following in PowerShell:

(Get-ChildItem 'C:\' -Hidden -System | where Name -eq "System Volume Information").CreationTime

That hidden folder dates back to at least XP era, so in theory, it'll reflect when the volume was first created as long as XP was first installed on to an NTFS partition. As long as you've never had to do a FAT32->NTFS conversion, a full system image restore or a reformat/restore of your data, it'll still have the correct creation time (in theory...)

 

[Entegy]

Hmmm that one might actually work. The creation date on my System Volume Information does ring a bell as to when I reinstalled Windows on my laptop.