MD5Look

With an active Internet connection, your files can be at great risk, but malicious content can easily find its way to your computer through other means as well. Windows knows whether or not a file is still intact through hash verification. What’s more, you can also identify files according to this value with applications like MD5Look.

One neat thing about the application is that you don’t even have to install it to take advantage of what it has to offer. This gives you the possibility to use it on other computers as well, directly from a USB flash drive, while keeping the target PC clean since registries are not modified. Just make sure that .NET Framework is a part of Windows for everything to go smooth.

The application comes with a built-in MD5 checksum verification tool, but you don’t exactly have access to it. However, it’s one of the core features of the application, because it uses it do check files in a custom path and reveal the file according to the code you provide.

Your effort mostly consists of grabbing the target MD5 hash code, unless you don’t already have it. A dedicated field needs to be filled in with this code, while another is used to specify the target folder to perform analysis. A simple browse dialog helps you pick the directory. There’s a large area which displays a real time updating log of the search operation.

Be prepared to wait for a while, because it can take some time to finish the scan process, especially if the source folder has complex structures and an abundance of different files. There isn’t a progress slider to let you know how much is left, so you need to keep an eye on the preview pane. When done, you can view a report in a plain text file you can save for later use.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that MD5Look is a practical application to scan your computer for a specific file, but only if you know its corresponding MD5 hash code. Although it can take a while to scan complex directories, result is shown as detected, with the possibility to save the log to file.