How to find out how often Windows Seven has rebooted?

Question

Where on the system or registry should I look for data on how many times Windows has been rebooted? I want to create an application that uses this information (how many times Windows has rebooted since the OOBE* process) to implement a specific feature.

I'm sure that Microsoft may have implemented this somewhere. I'm thinking about a registry key or something like this.

*OOBE - Out Of Box Experience, this is the process that happens when you boot-up your Windows for the first time and set-up the user, password and computer names.

Answer 1

I found the answer.

Find over:

"HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\BootId" 

The value, in decimal, that you will see is the number of times that your system already rebooted.

Answer 2

Each startup and shutdown is recorded in the Event Logs. Open the Event Viewer, and go to the System logs section. If you filter these records (Use the Filter Current Log button on the right) by the Event Numbers 12 and 13, you should just get the events notifying when the system is shutting down and starting up.

Event ID 12 is the system starting up, Event ID 13 is the system shutting down. It also provides the exact time when the event was logged in the event itself.

You could get your application to count the number of events with Event ID 12, which should give you what you want.

Answer 3

Here's another way : S.M.A.R.T

The vast majority of hard drives these days store SMART information. There are two pieces of informations you might be interested in : 04 Start/Stop Count 12 Power Cycle Count

Check out the wikipedia article on S.M.A.R.T and possibly the documentation of smartmontools.

smartmontools is an open-source project which can query this data in a CLI, or there are other programs around that can get this data with various GUIs : Wikipedia list of SMART tools

Answer 4

Check out the Reliability Manager in Windows 7

Answer 5

I've written two short scripts which can count the number of times a computer has turned on.

Unfortunately there isn't an event log for specifically for restarts, only for when the Windows starts up and shuts down.

These script searches the event log for event 12 which is logged when Windows starts. It then tells you how many times it has counted.

VBS Script: Count number of times computer has turned on

count = 0
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colLoggedEvents = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'System'" _
& " and EventCode = '12'")
For Each objEvent in colLoggedEvents
count = count + 1
Next
wscript.echo "Number of times operating system has started:   " & count

VBS Script: Remotely count number of times computer has turned on:

count = 0
strComputer=InputBox ("Enter the network name for the remote computer")
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colLoggedEvents = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile = 'System'" _
& " and EventCode = '12'")
For Each objEvent in colLoggedEvents
count = count + 1
Next
wscript.echo "Number of times operating system has started:   " & count 

Source VBS Script – Count Number of times computer has turned on