{"id":2027,"date":"2010-08-16T00:01:01","date_gmt":"2010-08-16T08:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=2027"},"modified":"2010-08-15T17:54:41","modified_gmt":"2010-08-16T01:54:41","slug":"how-long-have-you-owned-your-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=2027","title":{"rendered":"How Long Have You Owned Your PC?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.
\n
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

When you buy things online, you can look in your email program for the electronic invoice \u2014 if you’re smart enough to keep one. I have a mail folder called orders<\/code>, which I use to keep copies of all my online orders and invoices.<\/p>\n

Then again, not everyone keeps the same email program forever, so even an electronic invoice can get lost.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Specifically, your account folder in Windows is created the first day you start using your new computer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A user account folder's creation date in Windows 7.<\/p><\/div>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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

For example, in Figure 1 you see the date October 29, 2009. Yet on that same computer, the file purchase-date.txt<\/code> says:<\/p>\n

This computer arrived on April 7, 2008<\/code><\/p>\n

So there! The truth is revealed and known, because I bothered to create the file.<\/p>\n

Now if I were a total nerd, I would write a program that checked the purchase-date.txt<\/code> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2034,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions\/2034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}