Winzip or winrar archive#

WinAce supports the following file types: ace, zip, arj, lzh, rar, cab, arc, gz, tar, jar, tgz, lha, zoo, uue, iso, bz2, xxe, mim and xef, but it will only archive to: ace, lzh, cab, jar, gz, tar, tar.gz and zip. Well organized in tabs, they try to give users as much customizing power as possible, from supported archives, to shell integration, icons and compression parameters. You can: e-mail, encrypt, lock, test, convert, repair, protect, scan, optimize, create SFX archives (executable) or add authenticity verification. The archiving tools and functions are quite numerous. Why not a WinAce personalized context menu?

Winzip or winrar windows#

But sadly, when right-clicking on a file inside WinAce you get' the Windows menu.

Winzip or winrar plus#

The plus is that they offer a lot of tools, a lot of options for viewing and for the archive. The menus in WinAce are a plus, but also a minus. Why? Because not only that they're big and take a lot of screen space, but some of them could have been replaced by other buttons, with much more useful functions (and not anybody knows or thinks of customizing a toolbar). What I dislike about its interface is the buttons. I really didn't care back then about compression time and size. I must confess that WinAce was the first archiver I used, just because of this. The first thing you see when starting WinAce for the first time is the bluish very user friendly interface. Even for text files the difference is noticeable: at maximum compression WinZip finishes 1-2 seconds earlier and at normal compression even 3 seconds earlier.

The audio and image files took longer to compress using PPMd (maximum) compression and less with bzip2 (again maximum), although for the video file it was the other way around, but in the end, the fastest compression will beat the WinAce time and, of course, WinRAR. The video was compressed 3 times faster (at maximum compression) and even 5 times faster (at normal compression). In all tests, for video, audio, image and text, WinZip was the winner on compression time. The keyword for WinZip on this chapter is: Speed! This is the only thing WinZip is really good at.

Winzip or winrar zip#

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. The configuration 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. Before I start making an analysis on them, I must mention two things: First of all, this review is mostly a guide for beginners, so they should know what to expect (that's why I did not made complex tests about their performance, just compressed a few types of files that almost anybody uses) second: I did not use only my personal computer for these tests (not everybody has a 3200 MHz processor and I felt the need to present realistic compression times, but also confirmed on another computer). The top three programs were: WinRAR, WinAce, WinZIP. I went on Softpedia's Compression Tools category and sorted shareware archivers by downloads. So what do we do to bring their size closer to these kind of files? We, of course, shrink them by using a compression tool. Everybody uses different types of files, most of them are compressed, but still a DOC, BMP or WAV are sometimes necessary, although their size is a lot bigger than other file types in their category. Some like to say that size doesn't matter, but when it comes to files on my computer, I must certainly disagree.