7-Zip

7-Zip ScreenShotRating: 55 Star Rating pick 

Version tested:  4.42

7-Zip is without a doubt the strongest free archiving program out there.

I recently downloaded a 4GB DVD ISO saved under RAR format and split into multiple archives. I was using IZarc as my archiving software and was surprised when the extracting process failed. I assumed it was a bad archive and was going to delete the files and move on when on a whim I decided to install try 7-Zip. Sure enough, the extraction worked. Great, I thought, a makeshift test that I could use to test different free archivers (ZipGenius, Quickzip, IZarc, and Extractnow failed to extract the file, while TUGzip and 7-Zip were successful).

7-Zip will compress and extract archives in 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR formats and will extract RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS formats. Although I dont use it (and am not planning to), the 7z (7zip) format is supposed to offer a higher compression ratio than either ZIP or RAR.

Cool things about 7-Zip: very simple interface, fast and powerful archiver, 2-10% better compression ratio for ZIP format (compared to Winzip and PKzip), many formats supported.

Not so cool: creates autoextract archives only for 7z format, no support for ACE format, could use more elegance/form factor, archive icon not very attractive (sounds silly but actually matters to me).

A free alternative to: Winzip, Winrar, PKzip, etc…

Go to download page for latest version.
The program home page. 7-Zip entry on Wikipedia.


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8 Comments so far

  1. Naca al-Dolches on October 11th, 2006

    The only thing I don’t like about 7-zip is that you can’t ‘drag & drop’ a file to add it to an archive.

    Other than that, it’s best free archiver out there.

  2. Byru on October 11th, 2006

    The detail i dont like is the GUI which could be easily (and i hope will be) fixed in next releases. I use it as a portable decompressor on my USB Drive and it works perfectly.

  3. Barry on November 24th, 2006

    Isn’t it winrar free? I’ve donwloaded from winrar.com and using it without paying anyhting. I pretty much like it.

  4. sandraissa on December 31st, 2006

    Happy new year !-!
    o:)))))

  5. Blake on May 10th, 2007

    ZipGenius now supports more than 20 compressed archive formats, including CD/DVD-ROM image files in ISO9660 standard,RAR, ARJ, ACE, CAB, SQX, OpenOffice.org documents and the excellent 7-zip. ZipGenius now can precompress executable files going to be added to a ZIP archive through the UPX compressor.

    And, I prefer the pop-up window’s options over 7Zip’s.

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