I wanted to know when I last installed the operating system on my computer. Let’s see how we can find that out on Windows, Linux and macOS.
Windows
Open a command prompt or the terminal and type systeminfo. You find the installation date in the field Original Install Date:
This value gets overwritten when you install a newer version of Windows.
Linux
Open the terminal and run this command to find the line with “Birth” in the output of the stat tool:
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sudo stat / | awk '/Birth: /{print $2}' 2020-10-16 |
Should the entry be empty, you can use this alternative command that uses the tune2fs tool:
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sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda5 | grep 'Filesystem created:' Filesystem created: Fri Oct 16 22:11:16 2020 |
Both commands use the root filesystem / to determine when you installed the operating system.
macOS
Make sure that you open Console and not the terminal. Go to the Log Reports section and search for the install.log file. The installation date of your Mac should show up among the first entries in the file:
Depending on the settings of your Mac, the date in the log file may lack the year part. If this is the case, sort the log files by date and check in the oldest files for an entry with a year. The file DiskUtility.log is often a good place to find the date you are looking for.