Best archiver?

Best archiver?

  • WinRAR

    Votes: 39 60.9%
  • PowerArchiver

    Votes: 12 18.8%
  • WinACE

    Votes: 4 6.3%
  • WinZip

    Votes: 6 9.4%
  • Other

    Votes: 3 4.7%

  • Total voters
    64
  • Poll closed .
we already had that discussion (perhaps even more than once) !
use search in the forum and you'll find the results
FortiTude

ps: my favorite is winrar3
 
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Best would be subjective. I agree with joripe. Winrar is certainly the most popular so for me, that's it. Awhile ago, Winace had the best compression ratio, but I am not sure how well Winrar 3 stacks up against it now.


Strype
 
I download lot of files in Usenet and can't do without WinRAR so WinRAR get my vote. If a single archive file then not much different between them to care which one if the best. A program with multiple ZIP files then I use DOS PKUNZIP because it's the only one I know (tried) that can unzip more than one ZIP files at once.

I also have WinZIP installed and let it handles the .ZIP file because most small and single programs are in ZIP format, I often read the .NFO file in archived file (launch from my news reader) and WinZIP can load .NFO (or any text file) faster than WinRAR can.

Those are the simple reasons why I use the programs.
 
winrar and winace can both extract multiple zip files at once, i don't remember how it worked with winace but winth winrar just select them and klick with the right mouse button and it says extract to ./<the-name-of-one-of-the-files> or extract to seperate folders adn it will extract all files at once
i only use the right mouse button and extract for every type of archives i never open up the program. and winrar handles all of them for me
FortiTude
 
Power Desk 5.0 also has it's own archiver, plus way too many things to mention here. I much prefer it to Windows Commander.
 
FortiTude said:
winrar and winace can both extract multiple zip files at once, i don't remember how it worked with winace but winth winrar just select them and klick with the right mouse button and it says extract to ./<the-name-of-one-of-the-files> or extract to seperate folders adn it will extract all files at once
i only use the right mouse button and extract for every type of archives i never open up the program. and winrar handles all of them for me
FortiTude
I have the latest of WinRAR, WinZIP, WinACE on my system, and will try multiple ZIP sees how it works. Also, I came from DOS type so I still spending lot of time at DOS Prompt ;-)
 
Thanks for IZarc!

I like 7-zip, and I'll like it better still when the frontend arrives, which will complete the tightest zip program known!
 
Luuve said:
I have the latest of WinRAR, WinZIP, WinACE on my system, and will try multiple ZIP sees how it works. Also, I came from DOS type so I still spending lot of time at DOS Prompt ;-)
i prefer "start --> run ..." (but dos promt rulz too :) )
you can run most progs from there, just enter the filename, like winrar, if he doesn't find one just enter it's path to "App Paths" in the registry
(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths)
FortiTude
 
I spend many hours daily at DOS promt and sure don't want to have a long list of commands in the START --> RUN window. Or I don't want to scroll through hundreds of commands to find some useful aps use to check/control Window like "MSConfig", "Regedit", and "WinIPcfg" etc.

I get used to with DOS commands so it won't bother me, and I can do pretty quick too.
 
WinRar, Ace, PowerArc and the rest may be the best but WinZIP is the "defacto" standard these days. ZIP format is the most common and IMHO various incompatible formats like .ace, .rar just make our net life more difficult. Of course i have Winrar, just because i need it to decompress some .rar archives, although i use Winzip for my needs.
BTW PowerArchiver 8 is a nice program although somewhat slow.

regards
 
Joripe, maybe you're right.
In my case i never compress using .rar format so Winrar doesn't offer anything. BTW what's the meaning of so many archivers ? I remember early years when Pkzip (for dos) was the standard and other compression methods (ARJ, LHA, ARC, PAK, etc) where quite common. Almost none of them lives today.

regards
SSB

joripe said:
ssb beg to differ but if winrar does Zip as well dont need Winzip
 
poko: ever tried to open any zip file without the password ?
you won't success except if it was a very short key, because even when winzip has only 56 bit (what's not quite right, it uses 3 32 bit keys to encrypt the 12 byte header (only exists in encrypted zip files) and then it uses these 3 keys to encrypt every byte of the file but after each of byte the keys change, and these keys are at the beginning created using the password you supplied)
without knowing anything about the files you want to extract the only way is brite-force and that takes much time if the author used a good pw, there are some other ways to decrypt a zip file but you need to know the beginning of the first file in the archive ...

but i agree winrar has many advantages, like you said the better compression algorithm, you can split the archives by exact byte values, you can add a recovery record to recover damaged archives and you can make winrar crate recovery volumes to recover missing parts of big sets of archives
FortiTude
 
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