Thinkpads Forum

Is there a tool (preferably under Win XP) that can tell me the total system up time (i.e., time the Thinkpad was powered on during its lifetime)? thx.

I don't believe that there is anything built into the Thinkpad which could tell you this information (I could be wrong ). The closest thing that I know you could easily get would be to query the hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. values. As long as the HD manufacturer supports the Power On Time parameter, you could use that as a rough guide as to how long the system is on. I don't know if the counter continues to run when the operating system is in the standby mode. If you don't use standby or use it infrequently, then your overall run time should be fairly accurate. Obviously if you change the hard drive then you would need to retain the total elapsed time on that drive and add it to your new drive. This post might help:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 627#426627

The last item on this page seems to be what you're looking for...

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, neither does exactly what I want (as there is apparently no built-in hardware support in the Thinkpads for this).

The reason I had asked was that I just got a "refurbished" Thinkpad from the Lenovo outlet and it looks just like new. I was just curious whether it had been used at all, which other than the battery's first used date of April 2008, there is no indication of it.

My T41 runs about 15 hours per day seven days a week and has done for about 5 years. I only shut it down at night. My NetVista A30 desktops runs 7x24 and has done for about 5 years. I expect I am not all that unusual with respect to the T41, so I would expect any used machine to be well-used. ... JDH