August 16, 2010

How Long Have You Owned Your PC?

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

It’s a good question: How can you tell when you took your current PC home and first set it up? Knowing the date is important because computers last only 4 to 6 years at their best, longer if you take care of the thing.

The stupid way to look up the purchase date for a computer is to find its invoice. That can be tedious when you don’t keep any records.

Actually, there are two types of purchase records. The first is the invoice, which you probably threw away. I keep 7 years of records for business reasons, but I’m still not going to go sifting through boxes and file folders from years back looking for an invoice.

When you buy things online, you can look in your email program for the electronic invoice — if you’re smart enough to keep one. I have a mail folder called orders, which I use to keep copies of all my online orders and invoices.

Then again, not everyone keeps the same email program forever, so even an electronic invoice can get lost.

Of course, the computer itself knows when you purchased it. That’s because certain files are created for you when you first set up your account.

Specifically, your account folder in Windows is created the first day you start using your new computer.

In Windows, open the Computer window, open Drive C, then open the Users folder. Right-click on your account’s folder and choose the Properties command. You’ll see the creation date for that folder, which is shown in Figure 1.

A user account folder's creation date in Windows 7.

Above, the dialog box shows that my user account, Dan, was created on October 29, 2009. (Click the image to see the full-size version.)

There are some circumstances when the date you see on your account’s folder might not be the actual purchase date. For example, if you’ve restored from a backup or transferred old files to a new hard drive in the same PC.

To avoid any confusion, I recommend creating a small text file on each new computer you get. Name the file purchase-date.txt. Inside the file, type the date that the computer arrived.

For example, in Figure 1 you see the date October 29, 2009. Yet on that same computer, the file purchase-date.txt says:

This computer arrived on April 7, 2008

So there! The truth is revealed and known, because I bothered to create the file.

Now if I were a total nerd, I would write a program that checked the purchase-date.txt file every time the computer was started. The program would display the computer’s age as part of the startup script (or graphically in a dialog box). Further, such a program could send an alert when the computer gets over 4-years-old, letting you know that you should at least think about getting a new computer.

I’m not enough of a nerd to actually code such a thing. And I imagine that most people probably don’t care, seeing how the typical computer owner simply uses their computer until it dies and then they get a new one. That is, lamentably, an avoidable situation.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Powered by WordPress