RAR vs ZIP
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I hate the WinRar interface. X| Besides, Rar is not as ubiquitous as Zip.
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
You kiddin'? When it comes to UI, WinZip is an absolute dog of an application. If I didn't have WinRAR or 7ZFM on my system, I'd do all my zipping and unzipping at the command prompt (seriously, I have and I would again). As for the ubiquity of RAR, WinZip even supports opening RAR files now, and 7ZFM has for as long as I've had it.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk E-mail: chris at coldacid dot ent Web: http://coldacid.net/
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I have to agree with the other "never" response. I have unziped thousands of files using the built in zip and never once had to do it a second time. It is about as idiot proof as it gets. Granted there are features missing if you want to pack something up for distribution but that is not what it was meant for.
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Suddenly every second submission I'm seeing is packed full of RAR nastiness. Has someone, somewhere decided that WinRAR is way, way cooler than Winzip and I didn't get the memo? Or is there a university somewhere preaching zip bad, rar good? It's just weird.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
The Imploder on the Amiga is the still unbeaten champion of compression applications... it even had its own music, which still sounds amazing today! :cool: Other than that I now use 7-Zip.
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Maybe I come under fool, or idiot, however, it would seem they have fixed it now, I've just tried it again on a large file. In the past it would leave the ‘Next’ button enabled while it was unzipping, leaving the (very impatient) me to click it again (thinking it hadn’t understood my ever so simple request). Anyway, I use Izarc now http://www.izarc.org/ , and it does RAR and ZIP and its free. So, does anybody else use IZarc? At one point I heard it had spyware in it, but it all seems fine.
I've been using IZarc for a couple of years now, though I only use it when WinZip can't accomplish whatever I need. If .7z and .rar files really do take over, though, I can see I'm going to be using it much more. I also noticed just lately that IZarc's UI actually shows folders, where my old WinZip 9 doesn't. I'll bet I'm far from the only one who has ignored all the WinZip upgrade notices, since IZarc is free and there's nothing in WinZip 10+ that I'm willing to pay money for. -- modified at 1:21 Friday 2nd February, 2007 (Grr... staying up too late trying to get my laptop's wireless to work in Edgy results in annoying little typos. :doh:)
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Suddenly every second submission I'm seeing is packed full of RAR nastiness. Has someone, somewhere decided that WinRAR is way, way cooler than Winzip and I didn't get the memo? Or is there a university somewhere preaching zip bad, rar good? It's just weird.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris did not get the memo becuase there wasn't one. Someone just submited RAR archive, which - to my surprise and despite to myriad of applications handling all major formats - caused Chris a headache. I don't use WinZip. The market is so saturated with free (de)compressing tools, that nobody should be *buying* one.
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In all my recent XP installs, I've stopped installing WinZip, since the builtin ZIP-support of XP is enough as I see it. Oh, and I hate RAR.
I'm with you. We have to ship software updates around to all our customers and use the buit-in ZIP support in XP and 2003 Server. It mightn't be the best but the last thing we want is to have to install and support another piece of software and much less, pay for one, at every site. We're talkin' users here, not geeks.
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Michael Dunn wrote:
I've always found WinRAR to give better compression than WinZip 9
You said it... I had a release to the offshore team members and I compresses the source files and binaries. It was nearly 52 MB or something when I used zip but in RAR which compressed the files 3 - 4MB lesser in size. Actually the size of the file really very costly while transfer data through FTP or some other slow medium.
-Sarath_._ "Great hopes make everything great possible" - Benjamin Franklin
My blog - Sharing My Thoughts, An Article - Understanding Statepattern
Also, if you haven't tried it, try using solid compression on the RAR file. It makes the archive all one stream, instead of individual files, and puts files of same type next to each other to help out the compressor. You can get quite significant savings (an extra 30% sometimes), especially if there are a large number of files.
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In all my recent XP installs, I've stopped installing WinZip, since the builtin ZIP-support of XP is enough as I see it. Oh, and I hate RAR.
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Suddenly every second submission I'm seeing is packed full of RAR nastiness. Has someone, somewhere decided that WinRAR is way, way cooler than Winzip and I didn't get the memo? Or is there a university somewhere preaching zip bad, rar good? It's just weird.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I hadn't used WinZip in a long time (since discovering WinRar & 7zip) so in light of this discussion I gave the latest of each a quick try and I have to say WinZip sucked by comparison... horrible interface and the worst compression of them all, was there some reason in particular for disliking WinRar? Give me WinRar or 7Zip any day. Cheers.
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In all my recent XP installs, I've stopped installing WinZip, since the builtin ZIP-support of XP is enough as I see it. Oh, and I hate RAR.
Im Currently using Power Archiver and im having no problems, it has a nice UI and it can unzip almost anything, the only thing i found that it cant unzip is 7zip files
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Suddenly every second submission I'm seeing is packed full of RAR nastiness. Has someone, somewhere decided that WinRAR is way, way cooler than Winzip and I didn't get the memo? Or is there a university somewhere preaching zip bad, rar good? It's just weird.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
We started using Winrar at our company because we often compress and package Virtual Machines (often 3-10 GB) for a variety of reasons, such as demos, development environments, staging environments, etc. Winzip last I checked still could not be broken up into several files. Without this feature, you can't burn some of these on DVD's or CD's. Also when you package as an executable with WinRar (at the time we decided this), you had more flexible options than WinZIP. As another person mentioned, WinRAR started charging more ... but it has WinRAR has stuck with us so far. I am sure it could be a good time to re-evaluate. Finally, WinZIP is a great program, it compresses much slower than WinZIP, but at time it can compress better than WinZIP ... I haven't found the time trade-off worth while most of the time ( :p ). Cheers, Brian
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I have to agree with the other "never" response. I have unziped thousands of files using the built in zip and never once had to do it a second time. It is about as idiot proof as it gets. Granted there are features missing if you want to pack something up for distribution but that is not what it was meant for.
(Kenpo) Randy Jones wrote:
I have unziped thousands of files using the built in zip and never once had to do it a second time. It is about as idiot proof as it gets.
But compared to any other expander software its extremely slow, try unpack a 700Mb zip for example, on my machine with winzip it takes a couple of seconds, but with Windows Explorer it can take between 15 och 30 minutes to do the same. As for the original question, it seems Rar is somewhat more resilient against bit errors in transfer or storage and also have better tools to extract what was usable from a damaged archive. At least it was so a couple of years ago. Well that's my 5c Ulf Rosvall