Is there a way to get the system boot time?

"If you're running Windows XP, use Bootvis. you will get a detailed graph showing you exactly how long each application and device driver takes to load.

For later Windows versions use MSDN's Windows Performance Toolkit, an even better set of tools than the old Bootvis utility. At its most basic, you can use the tools to provide you with a similar graphical display of boot performance which was provided by Bootvis.

A simpler application would be Boot Timer, but it also works for Vista/7.

And then there is Passmark's AppTimer to analyze the startup behaviour of applications.

So much for software. Other than that, resort to Phoshi's hardware solution that works cross-platform :)"

"Under Linux, use bootchart to measure the boot time. It can also be used to analyze how much time is spent by which programs as well as I/O and CPU use.

More basically, you can check /proc/uptime to see how long the kernel has been running."