How to Check Last Computer Boot Time (Windows/Linux/Mac)

Quick Tips

• Checking your last boot and startup time is useful for troubleshooting hardware and software issues and monitoring your PC’s health.
• Windows and Linux offer a way to check both, though Mac only offers uptime.
• The command-line interface of all three operating systems can help you check.

PCs take different lengths of time to start up. They also keep running for different times. If you want to keep your PC healthy or troubleshoot any errors, checking startup and uptime is important. In this guide, we’ll be showing you how to check last computer boot times on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Why Check Last Computer Boot?

Your computer boot time is a good way to gauge a few things about your machine’s health. A good startup BIOS time should not exceed 15 seconds. But why bother checking this time, though?

Startup time can help you judge the state of your hardware, seeing as the initial BIOS boot initializes hardware (POST) before booting up your OS.

Uptime is another way to check how long your PC has been running – useful when checking for automatic restarts and overall runtime. A machine running too long has a higher chance of memory leaks and behaving erratically.

Check the Last Computer Boot on Windows

Windows offers users the chance to see how long it took their BIOS to start up. This is easy to check using two methods.

Method 1.

Step 1. Open Task Manager directly by pressing (Ctrl + Shift + Esc).

Step 2. Navigate to the “Startup apps” tab in the sidebar.

Step 3. Check the “Last BIOS time” in the top-right of the window, measured in seconds.

Method 2.

The second method is to use the Command Prompt:

Step 1. Open the Run Dialog (Win + R) and type in “cmd” before hitting (Ctrl + Shift + Enter) to run as Admin.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type “wmic path Win32_OperatingSystem get LastBootUpTime”and hit “Enter.”

Step 3. Command Prompt will show the last boot time in (YYMMDDHHMMSSMM and GMT).

Checking the Startup Time in Mac

Seeing as Macs don’t use BIOS in the way Windows PCs do, there’s no option to gauge startup time. Uptime, on the other hand, is easy:

Step 1. Go to Applications – Utilities and open Terminal.

Step 2. Type: “uptime” and hit “Enter.”

Step 3. Terminal will show how long your Mac has been up and running.

The second method uses the Top Menu:

Step 1. Click the Apple logo in the Top Menu while pressing the “Option” key.

Step 2. Click on “System Information” from the dropdown menu.

Step 3. Choose “Software” in the sidebar. In the main window, you’ll see “Time since boot.” This will let you see how long your machine’s been on.

Checking the Last Boot in Linux

Linux offers both a way to check your startup time and your uptime. Let’s begin with the startup time:

Step 1. Open Command Line (Ctrl + Alt + T).

Step 2. In the Command Line, enter “systemd-analyze time” and hit “Enter.”

Step 3. Your startup time (measured in milliseconds) should then appear in the line below.

For PC uptime, you can also use the Command Line:

Step 1. Open Command Line.

Step 2. Type “uptime” into the window and hit “Enter.”

Step 3. Command Line will show the duration the system has been running, the current time, load averages, and the number of users.