What program to use to compare big files under Windows?

Question

I'd like to compare two files under Windows, each about 1Gb in size.
I tried Total Commander and WinMerge and both ended with Out of memory error.
I'm running Vista Home Premium 64bit with 8GB of RAM so memory should not be an issue here...

Answer 1

I use Beyond Compare for this. It is a very good tool for file comparison and directory synchronization (although it is not free :-(

Answer 2

I use HashTab, worked fine for 1Gb files the last time i needed them and it's free.

Answer 3

It looks like they are both 32-bit apps, so even on a 64-bit platform they are bound to a 2GB max memory usage limit. Though, you would think they would have another way of handling this, such as paging the extra data.

Answer 4

Try a checksum comparison tool that uses MD5 or SHA1. I use digestIT 2004.

If you are just trying to diff, you could try a command line diff tool or DiffUtils for Windows. Textpad also has a comparison tool integrated it the files are text.

Answer 5

Try ExamDiff (Pro).

Answer 6

What about just using fc or comp?

Both are included in Windows and should have no problems handling large files. In fact, 1 GiB is actually a pretty small file.

Answer 7

If you want to find the differences rather than simply find out if the files are the same (via a checksum) then you could split the files first and then try a file comparison.
7-Zip File Manager will split files into 650Mb chunks (File > Split file...) which should then open in DiffMerge

Answer 8

So, which one work for you finally?

I use ExamDiff www.prestosoft.com/edp_examdiff.asp but I am not sure if it will work for ~1GB files.