Tip #555: Check your checksum

I’ve got new laptop – yay! Office 2016 installation would go to 88%, sit there for 20-30 minutes then crash with some streaming error. NOT yay. 3 complete re-installation later I decided to re-download the ISO image. Out of curiosity, compared new download to the old one. Everything looked fine, except the checksum. Meaning my previous download was corrupted. Doh!

Lesson: if you have information about the file checksum, always use it to verify that your download is not corrupted. You can quickly calculate checksum for any of your files using either:

• Command-prompt File Checksum Integrity Verifier from Microsoft
• Latest 7-zip installation that includes checksum calculator as a handy Explorer context menu.

It’s a shame that download center no longer provides a checksum. Dynamics CRM server is almost a 0.5GB file and it’d be nice to verify the integrity before facing strange errors and failed installations. Downloads from the volume licensing site as well as MSDN subscribers downloads do provide this information – use it.

As for the Office 2016, installation from the fresh, non-corrupted ISO image took about 4 minutes.