WinRAR – heavy-weight champion of the world. Review on WinRar

Compression software’s are a must for every newbie or techie. Long time back, everyone were using Winzip, as there were very few options for such compression software supporting Windows. But today there are a lot of software’s available, some freeware and others shareware, and most of them are much better than Winzip 8.x.

Here is a list of few of such software’s:

Freeware:

PowerArchiver 6.x

ICEOWS

UltimateZip

FilZip

Shareware:

Winzip 8.x

PowerArchiver 7.x

WinRAR 3.x

Squeez 4.x

WinAce 2.x

WinAce provides a better compression ratio than Zip and has a few of advanced features like solid archive and recovery record. But it’s very slow and resource hungry, so let’s just leave it from rest of the comparison.

PowerArchiver supports a large number of formats for creation of archives including Zip, LHA, Arj, Cab, etc. and still more formats for extraction. But none of these formats contains features like solid archive or recovery record. So lets just pass it.

Winzip, the old man in the race, is about to stop running. It supports the same number of formats it use to support in oldddder versions, with just a few features and interface being changed each time. Few formats even require external file support.

Squeez is the most formidable opponent to WinRAR and far much superior to all the above mentioned software’s. It supports lots of formats for compression as well as extraction. It can now only create Zip, Cab, LHA and Arj files but can also create RAR, ACE and its proprietary format SQZ files.

And the winner is WinRAR. It’s a winner even when Squeez can create RAR, ACE and other file formats, and WinRAR can create only Zip and RAR files, simply ‘coz, WinRAR has a feature edge over Squeez.

Following are few of its features:

• Complete support of RAR and ZIP archives;

  
  




• Highly sophisticated, original compression algorithm;

  
  




• Special algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel executables compression;

  
  




• Shell interface including drag-and-drop facility and wizard;

  
  




• Command line interface;

  
  




• Non RAR archives (CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO) management;

  
  




• Solid archiving, which can raise compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing a large number of small, similar files;

  
  




• Multivolume archives;

  
  




• Creation of self-extracting archives (also multivolume) using the default or optional SFX modules;

  
  




• Recovering physically damaged archives;

  
  




• Recovery volumes allowing to reconstruct missing parts of multivolume archives.

  
  




• Support for Unicode in file names;

  
  




• Other service functions, such as encryption, archive comments, error logging, etc.