HOW TO - Hash a file in Windows

q: The customer called and had two copies of a file. They wanted to identify if they matched exactly or not because the file dates were different.
a: A simple hash should help with that.

1. Open an elevated command prompt
2. Run this command
3. CertUtil -hashfile c:\path-to-file\filename.txt MD5
4. This will generate an MD5 of the file. Without the MD5 switch it will default to SHA1.
5. Run the same command on the other file and see if they match.