Hash It – File Checksum Calculation Tool

Hash It is a little but fast tool to help you find out the MD5 and SHA-1 hashes of files. It works on Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP and Vista. You can add it to right-click context menu in Windows explorer so that you can quickly right-click on any file and calculate the hashes. Currently, it supports only MD5 and SHA-1 hashing algorithms but soon SHA-256 would be added as well.

Why use Hash It?

Many download servers, especially the ones related to open source community, give the MD5 and SHA-1 hashes of the files you download. A hash checksum of a file remains same unless it is altered. If even a single byte of that file is changed the hash checksum changes – indicating that the file was altered and is not same as the author or publisher of the software intended you to download. The file change may occur due to network problem or a virus or malware altering the file.

You can find the MD5 or SHA-1 checksum of a file using the Hash It tool and match the checksum with the one given by the software publisher. If they are same, you have the un-altered software the publisher has posted on his/her website.

Installing Hash It

Hash It does not come with any setup program or installer. The reason is because it does not really need one. All you have to is unzip it to a folder and start using it. The following steps describe how to install (?) Hash It on your computer.

1. Download Hash It to your computer. (Go to Downloads section for download links)
2. Unzip it to any folder you want on your hard disk. It should not be a temporary folder. Do not run it from within the zip file. Running it from the zip file, makes the archiver (like WinRAR, WinZip etc) to copy the files to a temporary folder which gets deleted when you close the archiver window.
3. Run Hash It by double-clicking on HashIt.exe.
   Note : If you want to add it to your Windows right-click context menu, then you need to run HashIt.exe with admin privileges for the first time. In Windows XP, you need to be running an admin account when running Hash It for the first time. In Windows Vista, right-click on the HashIt.exe and choose to Run as administrator as shown in the picture :
4. To add the right-click context menu, just check the checkbox labeled Add to context-menu. To remove the context-menu later, just uncheck this same checkbox. (Read step 3 before you do so)

Un-installing Hash It

Hash It does not need uninstaller. Just follow these steps to remove Hash It from your system :

1. Run Hash It with administrator privileges (read step 3 in previous section).
2. Uncheck the checkbox labeled Add to context-menu and close Hash it.
3. Delete the file HashIt.exe.

Using Hash It

Using Hash It is a breeze. If you have not added it to you right-click context menu, just run Hash It and click on the tiny button with ellipses (three dots) as shown in the picture below :

This would result in a file open dialog popping up. Select a file you want and click Open as shown :

Hash It would start calculating the selected file’s hash and display the result when done.

If you have added it to the right-click menu, then just right-click on any file in Windows Explorer and select Calculate Hash as shown in the picture :