WinZip: By far one of the better windows based archive programs available on the market today, and one of the few that handles the .zip extension. It has just about everything you need to manage your .zip archived files. I have been using this product since it’s version 5 and below I will list some of the reasons why.

Easy Install: The install of WinZip is by far one of the best self-installers I have seen in any Windows application. It looks fairly standard, but if you delete the primary install files, reinstall your OS, and click on winzip32.exe again, it will install itself again. No need to run back out on the net to gain another copy. No other Windows application, to my knowledge, has this feature. The uninstall of this product is also just as smooth as the install. It removes itself clean from the OS, without all the headaches caused by some of the uninstall programs built into today’s apps.

Easy to use: WinZip is very easy to use. In most cases it’s as simple as right clicking on a .zip file, selecting “extract to:” and selecting the location for the archived files. It also comes with a wizard mode for the people just starting out with archive programs.

Frequently updated: This program doesn’t have much competition, but the author still puts out new releases quite frequently. In fact the current version, 7.0, has not been in final stage for an extreme amount of time, and they have already released WinZip 8.0 beta.

Missing Feature: One thing WinZip is lacking, and has been since its origination, is multiple archive support. With files as big as they are now days, and as easy as it is for files to get corrupt in the transfer process, you need to span a 10meg file into 4 or 5 different zip files to insure a perfect copy. I believe they came out with a plug-in a while back, but it never worked all that well. I think that other archives are used more frequently just for the fact that WinZip does not support this feature. If I have a 30 .zip archive I find myself dropping into command prompt and using the old pkunzip.exe to unarchive this many files, cause it is just unpractical to do 30 files one at a time.

Conclusion: I use and love this program, I would suggest it to anyone from a newbie to a hardcore user. The program will never be the archiver of choice until it implements multi-volume support. But will remain one of the top players in the archive software industry.




Recommended: Yes