FREE 7ZIP Archive (Compression and Decompression) Utility

Prior to Windows XP, you used to have to install a third-party archiving tool like WinZip in order to even view ZIP files. Fortunately, that's no longer the case. Windows archiving from XP onwards natively supports the creation and extraction of files in ZIP format.

What are Archives for?

Why would you use Archives? Well, there are several good reasons;

• If you have a lot of files and you want to save them as ONE single file either for archived storage or to make it easier to send them via an email.
  
  
• If your files are quite large archiving will often shrink them down. Note that archiving usually doesn't work well on files which are already compressed (particularly JPEG and Movie files).
  
  
• If you're converting files for a comic. If you archive a whole heap of JPEG /JPG files to ZIP and then rename it as a .CBZ file, you can use a comic book reader to view them.

How To compress a bunch of files in Windows

1. Select the files you want to compress in windows explorer (the file manager)
2. Right-mouse click on your selection
3. Choose Send To,
4. Choose Compressed (zipped) Folder
5. Windows will create a new Zip file for you.

How To Decompress a ZIP file in Windows

1. Find the ZIP File in Windows Explorer (the file manager)
2. Right-mouse click on it
3. Choose Extract All...
4. You'll be prompted to choose a location to extract to.
5. Click Ok.

Enter 7Zip

Unfortunately, despite these capabilities, windows archiving is still sadly lacking. It doesn't support all file formats - in particular the very common RAR format.

7ZIP is a great free open source Compression and Decompression utility. In fact, I've tried a lot over the years and 7ZIP is my personal favorite.

You can download 7Zip from here: http://www.7-zip.org/

It supports;

• Packing and unpacking for: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
• Unpacking only for: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.

Sadly it doesn't let you create RAR files but who needs them? You should probably only be sending ZIP files around anyway because they're the industry standard.

7zip is available for Windows only but is available in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

It has a nice graphical front end but I've hardly ever looked at it because the integration with Windows explorer is so nice.

Instead of hooking into the confusing "send to" area, 7ZIP gets an explorer menu of its own and you get several great options including compress and email. Right-clicking on an existing archive gives you the option of opening the archive in the current folder or a sub-folder. It's fast and it's fewer steps than the Microsoft alternative.

Give it a try. (http://www.7-zip.org/)