AStarted

Unlike the human body and brain, a computer can stay online and function for as long as it’s connected to a power supply, unless it gets physically damaged. In case you’re interested for how long you kept your PC busy, there’s the possibility to simply rely on applications like AStarted.

On the one hand, you can see what the application is all about from the moment it reaches your computer, because there’s no setup involved to take any of your time or effort. On the other hand, it can be carried around on a thumb drive to use on other computers besides your own, and this doesn’t affect stability, because it doesn’t modify any registry entries to show uptime.

When launched, a simple dialog window shows up to display the computer uptime. Aesthetics are of no concern here, with no particular elements to make it stand out from the crowd. The information text is intuitive enough, with no other details required to make you understand. When you get the idea, hitting the confirmation button makes the window go away.

On the bright side of things, the application manages to perfectly read time, even if you don’t run it as soon as the computer boots. However, keeping the window up doesn’t make the time update on the long run, so you need to run the application every time you want to check uptime.

Note that the application is only for personal purposes, with no possibility to check a different computer, such as verifying one on the same network. To save a bit of effort, it’s possible to assign a hotkey command to its shortcut so you launch it from any location.

All things considered, we can state that AStarted doesn’t really come with any innovative features, even though it does the job as expected. There’s no possibility to set up any kind of alerts, or monitor network computers, only serving as a simple means of finding out how long your computer kept running.