It’s only a couple of weeks since NirSoft’s last release, but the unstoppable freeware machine that is Nir Sofer has just announced another addition to his lineup, TurnedOnTimesView, a simple tool for reporting when a PC was turned on, restarted or shut down.

This has some obvious applications for system monitoring. If you’re wondering whether someone’s been using the family PC in the middle of the night, for instance, TurnedOnTimesView may be able to tell you more.

The program report also displays information which can help with more general PC troubleshooting. You’ll see how long the system typically remains on between restarts, for instance; the process responsible for a restart; and entries like “reason” or “shutdown code” can help to explain why a particular shutdown or restart took place.

The report lists all your PCs sessions, including when the computer was turned on and off

The TurnedOnTimesView report can reveal other, more general details about how a computer is being used. Regular shutdowns will normally have the “shutdown process” listed as Explorer.exe, for instance, but if you see “Msiexec.exe”, instead, then that means the PC has been restarted to complete an installation (or an uninstall).

Conveniently, you don’t have to install any kind of monitoring tool to access all this information. TurnedOnTimesView collects all the data it needs directly from your PC’s event logs, so you can run the program just about anywhere and see it work right away.

There are the usual NirSoft conveniences, too. The report is displayed in a fully sortable table, for instance, so clicking any column header – “Shutdown Type”, say – will organise the report by that field, making it quick and easy to identify whatever information you need.

And TurnedOnTimesView also has the standard NirSoft export options, and can save its report in TXT, CSV, HTML and other formats, for easy reference later (just right-click somewhere in the table to see what you can do).