WinZIP

WinZIP is one of the best and most popular applications meant for packing and unpacking archive files. This program is widely known around the world and has been present on the Internet for long years now. Apart from the ZIP files, it can handle such archives as ARC, ARJ, CAB, LZH, RAR, BZ2, TAR, Z, GZ, TAZ, TGZ, LZEXPAND, Uuencoded, Xxencoded, BinHex, MIME, and staring with the ver. 11 – also BZ2. The latest version can also unpack the RAR files, but cannot create the archives in this format. WinZIP offers the user all kinds of operations on archives. Apart from the standard functions, we can also secure an archive with a password. The compressed files can be encoded with a 128-bit or a 256-bit key.

A complex password will be unbreakable even for the most powerful breaching methods. Additionally, WinZP offers also self-extracting files thanks to which we do not have to have an unpacking application installed on the target computer. In the case of uploading files on the servers with a limited transfer, WinZIP allows for splitting the whole archive into smaller parts, the size of which we can decide on. This application integrates itself with the system file manager, so we can use it without the need to separately run the application proper. It can also handle several files at a time, both for packing and unpacking. The latest version of this application is equipped with an improved compression algorithm, which guarantees even better compression of files. It also allows for lossless compression of JPG images, even with the 25% reduction in size. The newest version of WinZIP allows for a dynamic work with the already existing archives, including creating and deleting catalogues, as well as adding, deleting and shuffling of files within and between archives.

WinZIP ver. 12 is the second edition supported by Corel Corporation, after WinZIP was taken over by WinZIP International. The change of owner resulted in a slightly changed interface and huge positive changes made to the functionality of this application.