Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson

This morning I googled windows install date to determine when I last rebuilt my desktop. This was the top result:

Unfortunately, both methods presented in the Dell article for finding the install date of Windows give incorrect information (at least in my particular case).

Important: Never assume the Created date for the C:\Windows folder corresponds to the time you originally installed Windows. That may have worked at some point in the past, but today that’s just plain wrong. Similarly – as mentioned in the Dell article – don’t trust the Original Install Date in the output from systeminfo either. More than likely, that value corresponds to a major Windows 10 update (e.g. upgrading from Windows 10 version 1909 to Windows 10 version 2009).

Since the article is the top search result on Google, I attempted to submit feedback in hopes that Dell might update the content to address the issues. That’s when I encountered the following:

See full-sized image.

As you can see, the feedback feature on the Dell website does not accept comments with “special characters: <>()\” – which blocked me from submitting the following feedback:

Both of the methods presented here give the wrong install date when Windows 10
has been upgraded (e.g. 1909 --> 2009 --> 21H2).

The following PowerShell gives the actual install date for Windows:

@(Get-ChildItem -Path HKLM:\System\Setup\Source* |
    foreach {Get-ItemProperty -Path Registry::$_}; Get-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion') |
    select ProductName, ReleaseID, CurrentBuild,
        @{Name='InstallDate';
          Expression={[TimeZone]::CurrentTimeZone.ToLocalTime(
            ([DateTime]'1/1/1970').AddSeconds($_.InstallDate))}} |
    sort InstallDate

Reference:

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/simple-questions-when-was-windows-installed-my-computer/

Now, I can sort of understand why the Dell website does not want you to enter angle brackets – specifically, to avoid potential issues with HTML content – but not accepting parentheses?! Really?!

As a user, it’s not my responsibilty to figure out how to avoid “special characters” or “escape” content when entering data; that’s a developer’s job. If you can’t figure out how to safely support angle brackets, parentheses, and backslashes in content submitted via the web…well, then maybe you shouldn’t consider yourself a qualified web developer.

Dell, please “enhance” your feedback system to fix this issue – or hire a consultant who can easily do this for you ;-)