HijackThis"Calculate MD5 Checksums "

If you need to share your HijackThis logs with others for help on which items should be removed from your system, there may be times where people ask for your MD5 checksums. These simply are values that HijackThis can calculate from files on your system that help determine if a program is really what it reports itself to be to HijackThis.

For example, your HijackThis logs may report that you have the "Google Toolbar Helper" installed on your machine. If you installed the Google Toolbar, this should be ok. However, if you do not remember installing the Google Toolbar, then perhaps a piece of spyware is on your machine masquerading as the toolbar. To help determine if this is the case, you can calculate the MD5 value and compare it to others' MD5 values for every available version of the Google Toolbar Helper. If none match, you may want to consider disabling/removing this item.

1. Start HijackThis, or restart it if HijackThis is already running. If the "New users quickstart" screen appears, click "None of the above, just start the program".

2. Click the "Config" button.

3. When the "Configuration" screen appears, click the "Misc Tools" button.

4. Scroll down to "Advanced settings" and check "Calculate MD5 of files if possible".

5. Click the "Back" button.

6. Click "Scan" to perform a scan. Note that scans will take longer as HijackThis calculates the MD5 checksum of each file in the results list.