XP

This is a handy utility that will patch your XP box from SP2 all the way up to the May 2006 security updates plus a little bit more, if you want. I typically carry a copy around with me wherever I go to avoid updating machines all day long by downloading everything from Windows Update. With one EXE, you can be up to date.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showforum=89

This will basically work with any Windows OS that has the 'systeminfo' command.

systeminfo | find "Up Time"

You can think of 'find' much like 'grep' under Unix.

It will return something that looks like "System Up Time: 4 Days, 1 Hours, 53 Minutes, 36 Seconds"

If you are on an older OS, you can always do "net statistics workstation" and look for the second line which will say something like "Statistics since 5/18/2006 11:17 AM"

It won't be accurate 100% of the time, such as in the case where you have restarted the workstation service, but 9 times out of 10, it will be correct.