My co-worker (who is forced to worship at the alter of Microsoft and support Windows servers) alerted me to the fact that Windows counts it’s uptime in seconds. Meaning that while my Linux box tells me something like this: up 27 days. A Windows box, were it able to stay up more than a day, would display something like: The system uptime is 86400 seconds. He thinks this is because Microsoft doesn’t expect their boxes to be up more than a few minutes anyway…

But just in case you actually manage to keep your Windows box up and running for more than a few minutes, and don’t want to have to use the Event Viewer just to see the uptime, you can try this perl script: uptime.pl

All kidding aside, I do manage to keep my Windows box running for days at a time, and once a week I reboot it when I get sick of seeing system error dialogs…