yagu's Journal: Windows Rant

Sheesh! I've just spent over 30 minutes (and still not solved) the problem of trying to find uptime on my windows XP machine. Actually, I'm trying to find out how to do it on my parent's machine, which is 2000 miles away, and my access is VNC and I have limited interaction with their machine.

I Googled for a solution, thought I found it with this article. Turns out not to work... at least on my XP system, and of course it doesn't work on my parents either. The problem? No "systeminfo" command on either machine, or at least it's not transparently in my command path search. (Yeah, it's on my list of things to continue research for this should've-been-easy-to-do-in-the-first-place problem.)

Interestingly, it looked like with the "didn't work for me" replies to the original article, I was going to find others with my same plight. But, no, they're just futzing around with and fighting the syntax of the stupid windows (actually DOS) "FIND" command. WTF?

So, while I'm sure I'll find out how to do this eventually, it's yet another example of how obtuse and obfuscated the windows world can be... I sure wish I had a charge code that I could charge back to Microsoft for all the time I spend trying to just make their stuff usable.

As an interesting aside, I have cygwin on MY machine, and easy enough, you simply type "uptime" and you get the info... go figure. Of course, cygwin isn't installed on my parents machine (though I'm now considering going that route, just for the convenience of the suite of unix commands to do some real word).

Sigh....

easy

[winkydink]

In a cmd window, type:

net statistics server

Re:easy

[yagu]

Hey Winkydink, Thanks for the suggestions. It's a start. Here are a couple of observations:

• I'm assuming the info: Statistics since: 'date, time, etc.' somehow implies that, were one willing and able to do the math (I'm able, not sure I'm willing, why the fsck can't Microsoft do this shit?), that that calculation would yield the uptime, though I'd be hard pressed to expect anyone to infer that by casual observation (there is nothing to indicate what the "anchor" for statistics indicates -- is it since l

Re:easy

[winkydink]

systeminfo is in my path at C:\WINDOWS\System32\systeminfo.exe

It's time of last boot.

I'll keep an eye out for your mail

Re:easy

[yagu]

Hmmmm, interesting. What OS are you running?

On my XP machine (home edition, could that be it?), on my parent's machine, and on my brother's machine, NO SYSTEMINFO.EXE (or Systeminfo.exe, or systeminfo.exe, or SyStEmInFo.ExE, etc.) in c:\windows\system32. Of course this only solidifies my point MS is a fscked implementation... again, inconsistent environments everywhere.

(Thanks for trying, though!)

Re:easy

[winkydink]

XP Pro. That may be the difference.