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Reposted from another thread after a mistake...

WinRar was always going to be the winner - it does just about everything, has excellent shell integration, and lets you use it for free as long as you click the OK box when it launches.

For those that want a truly free solution, 7zip is the best of the rest.

I have both installed and find I use one or the other when working with tgz, rar, zip, ace, iso on an XP machine.

Have been using Izarc for about 3 years now, and have yet to come across a format it wont open! Super cool freeware.

All I use on Windows is ICEOWS. Free and supports a lot of formats. I've checked out other free programs but this one smokes'em all. My employer still actually pays for licenses for WinZip. Idiots.

It seems strange that a "comprehensive" review of the various alternatives doesn't include something that high-profile.

Here's a feature that I want:

If a zip (or 7z or rar) contains *just one folder or file*, it should extract to the current directory. It should not create a superfluous enclosing folder.

If a zip (7z, rar) contains *more than one folder or file*, it should automatically create an enclosing folder so I don't end up with hundreds of icons on my desktop.

I shouldn't have to do this manually by choosing between "extract here" and "extract to subdirectory" context menu items.

StuffIt (aka ZipMagic) is the only archiver I could find that does this. Unfortunately StuffIt is an annoying piece of marketing-ware and isn't even widely used on the Mac anymore, let alone Windows.

Filzip!

Use filzip people! It's absolutely free and the best in my opinion.

http://www.filzip.com

does anyone know of a freeware extractor for these types of files on Windows? I refuse to use Alladin's 8+MB extractor simply for an archive type I don't encounter that often.

Is it me or does this seem like a commercial for WinRAR?

I've been using IZARC ever since I saw it recomended on "The Screensavers". It doesn't having that annoying license request pop-up that WinRAR pulls up on EVERY open, and it'll actually compress into all those formats rahter than just unpacking them. It has yet to fail me, even in the beta versions.

Thanks for that. I had never heard of it before.

It's totally awesome!

Strangely I've always been partial to WinACE. I know it isn't the most popular but it suits my needs fine. It is NOT crap as it is fast and it compresses very well. I honestly believe it wasn't given a proper eval in this test as I know it to give compression ratios very similar to WinRAR.

Plus even though I get an annoying popup once in while about not being registered, WinACE is still fully functional.

Yeah! Izarc is a very good archiver, plus 3.5 beta 3 has been released .

I use it and find it to be quit good. I can't stand winzip and avoid it if I can. I didn't know of all of these archivers, I might give Izarc a try, looks pretty cool.

I was always trying new software looking for a good alternative for WinZip (I like it's plain folder-less interface... sometimes speeds my tasks with drag and drop of files without the folder/sub-folders in the archive... the ideal, IMHO, would be a switch between these and the filesystem like interface) in the past, and it was hard...

Today we have a good number of programs to do this taks, and personaly, I do use WinRAR and home and 7zip at work. After 7zip added support for drag'n drop, became a very good tool for everyday's use. I still do prefer WinRar shell context menus (after selecting some options) and general performance, even if I don't like some parts of it's interface... so I probably tell they're also the ones I call 'best'.... =]

Also, Filzip has a nice and clean interface [1]... I may try it later...

[1] http://www.filzip.com/img/fzeng.gif

What a shame that such an important subject receives such shoddy treatment.

One of the 8 criteria that he judges all programs by is their ability to create RAR files when, by definition, only WinRAR can do this. This criteria should not even be there, yet it forms the basis of his ultimate conclusions (that are present at the beginning(!) of the article in the form of an infomercial).

The "baseline is 1.00" is really 50% compression and should be called that.

The author's conclusion that PPMd (or 7Z) should be used on small files only due to their slow compression times is illogical, since the space saved on small sizes is...small. It would make more sense to use PPMd, for example, on 10's or 100's of MB of files that you are trying to email, ftp or fit onto a CD you will make many copies of -- in these cases the extra time spent in compression would pay you back in email time, or number of CDs burned.

ZIP, PKZip and Winzip are not given a fraction of the promotion they deserve. In all test results listed, zip beats rar and of course 7z. And pkzip has advanced compression if a tiny amount of additional space is needed. But in most cases it is not -- a universal archive file format is needed much more.

Also, where were the command-line tests? I found PKZipWin to be a dog zipping 3,000 web pages in the GUI (with the time lost mostly in the selection process), but very fast in a shell or using a file that tells it what to zip. Any of us doing serious zipping are not doing it in a gui, but we are ignored in this article.

Finally, who compresses a game folder?! Games typically need their install CDs just to play them so if you are moving the game you already have the CD handy anyway. This choice of files to compress sets a record for inappropriateness. Most compression tests include different types of files, and involve several different scenarios. For example, test one could be 100MB of MP3 files (i.e. about one album), test two could be 1GB of WAV files, test three could be 100MB of web pages, test four 1GB of database files. These are the files we use, copy, email, and store every day, NOT game files (except perhaps custom levels/maps)!

I could probably make ten more negative points about this article but will spare everyone the wasted bandwidth. Instead I will just conclude by saying that this article was worse than useless, IMHO.

THANK YOU