WinZip 16.0.9715

WinZip, a software application that will archive and compress any file you have stored on your Windows-powered computer, has something that other products in the data compression business lack: history. The software that first saw the light of day in the early 90s had time to mature like a good wine – and plenty of time to gather quite a following. The simple fact that it is a properly good file archiver and data compression tool, combined with the fact that it has been on the market for what seems like forever, makes WinZip one of the most popular and most downloaded pieces of software out there.

What can you do with WinZip? You can perform two tasks easily: you can extract files from archives and you can compress files into an archive. Compressed files take up less space on your hard drive (no matter how much storage capacity you have, you will always need more) and are easier to send over the internet. Not to mention that files that exceed a certain size can’t be sent via email – in the case of Yahoo! Mail this limit is 10MB while in the case of Gmail the limit is of 25MB.

One of the hardest files to reduce in size are photos. This is because they have an already-compressed nature and most data compression tools out there fail to significantly shrink the file’s size. With WinZip on the other hand you will have no problem getting the file size of a JPEG file down as much as 20% in some cases. Assuming that you have a camera that WinZip provides support for, you can always transfer and compress photos directly from it.

For the experienced WinZip user, the software features a Classic mode – you get to select it when the program launches. For the inexperienced user that has rarely if ever used WinZip, the software comes with a Wizard mode. Thanks to the Wizard mode the task of accessing WinZip’s functionality (like for ample password-protection and compression ratios) becomes child’s play. It is in fact this ease of use that makes WinZip such a popular tool all over the world.

There are more user-friendly features that you should know about: you can rename files and folders within a ZIP archive, the Smart View automatically detects images and displays them as thumbnails, if you drag-and-drop a file from the interface it will be automatically archived or extracted from an archive.

WinZip can be used free of charge for the first 45 days only. Also, you can only use WinZip on a Windows-powered computer as the software does not come with multi-platform support.

Pros
Properly good data compression tool
Support for images
Very easy to use
Faster than WinRAR

Cons
Free to use only for the first 40 days
WinRAR provides support for more compression formats

WinZip has been reviewed by George Norman on 14 Sep 2009. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated WinZip 5 out of 5 stars, naming it Essential