The keyword for WinZip on this chapter is: Speed! This is the only thing WinZip is really good at.
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But, and this is where WinZip loses a lot of ground, it will archive files only to the zip format. Displayed in tabs and therefore very easy to browse, the options cover the essential aspects of the program's configuration.Ĭurrently, WinZip's 10th major version supports the following file formats: arc, arj, b64, bhx, cab, gz, hqx, lzh, mim, tar, taz, tgz, tz, uu, uue, xxe, z and zip. exe, UUenconde, etc.Ĭonfiguration window covers view, toolbar, system, explorer enhancements, program locations and other miscellaneous options. The Actions menu contains all important functions of WinZip: adding, deleting, viewing, extracting an archive and also other tools such as: Virus scan, split, encrypt, test, make. Browsing through them, you will surely realize that the only one you'll use often is Actions. The menus in WinZip are not very well balanced. You cannot browse through your computer inside WinZip if you want to open an archive, you'll have to use the Open button (or CTRL+O). The first thing you'll notice missing will probably be the file browser.
Although the buttons (as functionality, but also as design) are very good choices, the fact that they're not customizable (you cannot remove the text or make them smaller) is an important minus. The main screen has a simple interface, with buttons for the most important functions at the top. Probably the archiver everyone has heard about, WinZip presents itself as a very user friendly and easy to use application. This makes WinRAR the winner in the battle for smaller files in the shortest time possible. During testing not only did it have a much faster compression speed than WinAce, but the file sizes were a lot smaller too. It's quite amazing what this small app can do to your uncompressed files. With WinZip out of the picture from the beginning and WinAce winner only for video files, you can easily guess what the results were for WinRAR. WinRAR supports the following file formats: rar, zip, cab, arj, lzh, ace, 7-zip, tar, gzip, uue, bz2, jar, iso, z and will compress files to. The options are not as numerous as in WinZip and WinAce, but like all other aspects of WinRAR, they are practical and cover the basic needs for properly configuring an archiver. The menus offer access to important archive commands (like extract, test, comment, protect, lock), but also other important tools such as scan, convert or benchmark and hardware test. You can easily reduce the size of the buttons which offer you the basic operations for an archive: extract, test, repair, find, etc. This little archiver has a very practical user interface.