Easily View Your System Uptime Reports With TurnedOn TimesView

TurnedOnTimesView is a new free utility from popular developer Nir Sofer – it’s a simple tool to detect the time ranges that your computer was started up and shut down. It gets this information by analyzing the Windows event log – note that, if you clear the System event log, there will no longer be any data for it to display…

Although you could eventually track down the same data by looking in the event log itself, this utility is a welcome improvement as it strips out only the relevant times, making it easier to see how long the PC has been on for and why it shut down.

TurnedOnTimesView is a tiny free program (and doesn’t need to be installed) – it works on all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 up to and including Windows 8.

For every time duration that the PC was turned on, it displays the following information as shown in the illustration below:

  • Startup Time
  • Shutdown Time
  • Duration
  • Shutdown Reason
  • Shutdown Type
  • Shutdown Process
  • Shutdown Code

turnedontimesview

All columns in the table are sortable – e.g. click on ‘Duration’ column heading to sort the entries ordered by the length of running time. The utility can also provide the same information for a remote PC on your network if you have sufficient access rights (to read the event logs remotely).

How To Use TurnedOnTimesView – Download the program in a zip file from Nirsoft at the bottom of the page here. Unzip (extract) the zip file and run the .exe program file to open the program – anyone used to NirSoft utilities will be familiar with the layout and find their way around easily.

As is common, you can select one or more entries in the table and copy/paste them or export them into a csv/tab-delimited/html/xml file by using the File \ Save Selected Items menu bar option (Ctrl+S hotkey) or by selecting the floppy disk icon.

Note: only full Start Up and ShutDown cycles are reported – Standby, Sleep, Hibernate (and hybrid sleep modes) are not full shut downs so they are excluded from the report. If you use these modes a lot then don’t be surprised to see Duration times of several days/weeks between full ShutDowns.

To access data for a remote PC on your network, press F9 (or Options\Advanced Options from the menubar), choose Remote Computer as the data source and type in the computer name.

Tip: Windows 7 and Vista users may see the occasional ‘System Failure’ with a shutdown error code of 0x000500FF in their report – this is usually due to a known problem where this code is incorrectly written to the System Event Log even if a different shutdown reason was provided by the user who initiated the shutdown – see Microsoft’s KB article for more info.

Conclusion

The utility is a quick and portable way to display or save/print the startup and shutdown history of a PC – both local and remote. Unlike wading through the Windows event logs, this lets you see just the relevant data in one table which saves a lot of time.