| Information About MD5 Checksums | ||
| How to use an MD5 checksum to verify a downloaded file | ||
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MD5 checksums are used to provide a reasonable level of assurance that a transferred file has arrived intact and is not corrupted or incomplete. | |
| An MD5 checksum is a 32-character string that is generated by running the Message-Digest Algorithm 5 (MD5) hash function on a chosen file. | ||
| The 32-character output from this process is then almost unique to this chosen file, which for the purposes of this website will be the installation setup file(s) that you will be downloading. | ||
| Together with each download link on this website you will find a corresponding 32-character MD5 checksum for this particular file, produced when this installation setup file was first created. | ||
| Once you have downloaded the file using the download link, but before you run this setup application (EXE file), you can therefore check that the file you have actually downloaded has arrived intact and complete, without being corrupted or tampered with along the way. | ||
| You do this by running the same MD5 hash function on this downloaded file, checking the resulting 32-character checksum that you obtain with the checksum that is listed on this website for that file. | ||
| If your 32-character checksum matches up with the checksum shown on this website then it is highly likely that the file you have downloaded is exactly the same as the original, and you can confidently launch this setup file on your computer. | ||
| If you do not already have an MD5 checksum generator installed on your computer then please see the panel down the right hand side of this webpage. | ||
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Please Note: | |
| The MD5 checksums provided are not meant to provide absolute proof that the file downloaded has not been tampered with. | ||
| However, they should provide a reasonable level of assurance that the file is complete, and has not been corrupted or tampered with during the download process. | ||
| For more information about MD5 checksums and how they work please see the MD5 Wikipedia page. | ||
If you do not have an MD5 checksum generator installed on your computer, and would like to use this process to verify a setup file being downloaded from this website, then here is a Windows open-source application that works from within Windows Explorer to provide MD5 checksums. SuperScript Solutions provides the above link without any warranty, express or implied, and bears no responsibility for how it is used, or any problems that might occur. |
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| If you would like links to other MD5 checksum applications then please visit the MD5sum Wikipedia page. | ||
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