I'm not sure what the limiting factors are for the time it takes to do a
checksum.  The speed of the processor is of course one thing, but how much
system memory you have could also play a part.  I also wondered about
whether using a windows utility might be any faster, but it didn't seem to
make any difference.

I tried MD5summer (a windows MD5 utility) on a 700+ MB file on my system,
and it took 24 seconds to complete.  This is with an overclocked Athlon XP @
2.3 GHz, which is pretty close to equivalent to a Pentium 4 3.0 in its
processing horsepower.  I have 1.5GB of RAM installed.  If I ran the check
again, it only took a few seconds to come up with the same results.  I think
this just means that some of the previous work was still available in
memory.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "Venkat Viswanathan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 12:53 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Processor speed question


> HI all members,
>
> I have a celeron D 2.4 GHz. recently i did a md5sum check on a knoppix
> live cd download (700 MB approx) and i got the "blinking cursor" for what
> i thought was a long time so i thought something was wrong and pressed
> "enter" twice. after about 30 seconds the results of the check came
> through fine.
>
> out of curiosity i did the check again and timed it. it came to 2mts.50
> secs.
>
> my question is (1)if the processor was p4 2.4 GHZ instead of celeron would
> the results have come out faster? on a side note would a 3.0 GHz processor
> been faster.
>
> TIA and good day---Venkat
>
>                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
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>                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
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