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Apparently it is also available in Windows 7 but I no longer have any systems running Win7 so I cannot verify that. Now, MD5 is not a new thing and you would think that Windows 10 would have some form of utility built in that would calculate the hash – and there is. Obviously each download was accompanied by it’s MD5 checksum so that I could verify the file but after freely installing all manner of utilities in the past I was a little bit wary this time around. If you Google for ‘MD5 checker’ you will see a number of utilities and while I have no reason to doubt the integrity of any of these I stopped short of installing any of them. The “problem” is which utility do you use to calculate the checksum of the downloaded file? But with a view to keeping this system as clean as I can I decided to make a point going forward of checking these checksums when they are available. Now, I don’t always check these and maybe this is why my workstation ended up in a bit of a mess. Today I needed to install MySQL Workbench so I headed off to download it and noticed the MD5 checksum beneath the link.
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There could of course be multiple culprits. Previously I had all manner of applications, games (including Steam) and utilities installed and the chances of finding what was causing the problems was pretty remote. I recently paved my main development workstation after it started misbehaving (slow start up, some applications not opening consistently etc) and am trying to be careful about what I install on it going forward.
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