Windows 7: how do i determine whether its an original activation of windows

if you run speccy, it will tell you the date and time of the install under operating system. For instance, the computer i'm on now had windows seven installed on 22 December 2010 at 19:21 hours.

This might help.
Speccy - System Information - Free Download

Go to the top and tick on Operating System.

That only gives the date of the reinstall - which the OP already knows - not necessarily the first install.

the notebook is working just fine..there is nothing wrong with it..in fact there is no sign that it has ever been used within the operating system..all the bundled software from HP and drivers are all present..i just got curious and a bit paranoid!!
don't think i will be formating it any time soon..
i have a genuine MS office 2010 so i will get rid of the starter..thank you for your info..

i think systeminfo command gives you the same info..what i wanted to know was is this installation am using right now a first time activation by the buyer(the buyer here being the person who sold me the notebook since i found it was already working) or was the computer being used even before the date that the operating system says its the install date(9/19/2012) such that the seller did a system recovery(e.g a factory reset)

am talking about knowing if 9/19/2012 was the first time the computer was booted by the customer(the guy who sold me the computer is the customer) or was 9/19/2012 the date the system was recovered through the HP recovery partition or through a HP recovery discS..the version of windows is an OEM version since it has all the HP branding.

That date is the one on which the Recovery system installed the current instance of the OS - whether it's the first time the Recovery system has been used is something that maybe impossible to tell without detailed forensics.
I've never had to use a Recovery partition on a Windows 7 machine yet - although I have had to reinstall, but the Recovery partition had been corrupted, so I had to use a Retail disk - so I really can't comment on whether the Office Starter would reappear after such, but if the system has been properly done by the manufacturer in teh first place, there should be no difference whatever, and the Office install should be there.

so what you saying is that when someone buys a computer and boots it for the very first time it boots from the recovery?

Effectively, yes - that's what's supposed to happen, at least.
That way the user/purchaser get to decide whether or not to agree to the two sets of licensing terms - one from MS for Windows, and one from the OEM for everything else.
It's an MS requirement, as well as being legal requirement that this happens - as it gives the user the opportunity to refuse to install Windows, and they can then claim a refund (but that almost never happens nowadays - and the purchaser should have bought an OS-free machine anyhow, in that case).

so this kind of recovery is different from using the recovery partition(for instance when performing a factory reset)?