My work laptop is a fairly beefy machine. Dual Core Intel T7800 with 4 GBs of ram, running Vista Ultimate 32-bit. Some firmware and OS limitations limit my effective memory addressing to 3.26 GB, but still this machine is no slouch. I could never figure out what about my configuration caused seemingly simple operations like extracting the contents of a zipped file to take SO LONG. I fiddled with this setting and that setting but to no avail. Finally I got fed up and turned to the all-knowing Google. "Winzip Extract SLOW VISTA " returned a series of blog posting and user group chats complaining of similar performance. Among the responses was a reference to 7 Zip. A google search later I had downloaded 7 zip from here. 7 Zip is an open source alternative to winzip that is WICKED Fast. I mean orders of magnitude faster than winzip and the window's built-in zip compression.
According to the website, 7 Zip's features include
- High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
- Supported formats:
- Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
- Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
- For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
- Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
- Self-extracting capability for 7z format
- Integration with Windows Shell
- Powerful File Manager
- Powerful command line version
- Plugin for FAR Manager
- Localizations for 69 languages
Its great to see my laptop perform the way I thought it should. Do yourself a favor and download 7 Zip right now!
Want a better interface, but the same great compression engine? Try
JZip. Just as pretty as Winzip, Cheaper (Free!) and Faster.