Editor's Review - WinRAR | | |
Features
Stability
Usability
Interface
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| | WinRAR archiver is a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage, and control archive files.
It supports RAR and ZIP 2.0 archives, special algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel executables compression. You can now handle archives directly from Windows Explorer due to the shell integration including drag-and-drop facility and cascaded context menus. WinRAR features wizards for beginners and command line interface for advanced users. It can handle non RAR archives (7-Zip, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, Z, GZip) management, solid archiving which can raise compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing a large number of small, similar files.
Using WinRAR you can create multivolume archives, self-extracting archives (also multivolume) using the default or optional SFX modules. You can use a lot of service functions, such as encryption, archive comments, error logging, etc. The program has an inbuilt viewer for viewing the content of text files within archives. You can create compression profiles in order to optimize your activity.
It has a very friendly user interface, so that the menus are customizable and offer access to important archive commands like extract, test, comment, protect, and lock, but also other important tools such as scan, convert, or benchmark and hardware test.
Pluses: There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating environments: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, OS/2, MacOS X. You can test, lock and repair/recover physically damaged archives or volumes allowing to reconstruct missing parts of multivolume archives. You can also take advantage of miscellaneous options such as Background archiving, turn PC off when done, compression estimation.
Among the new features we may mention: new buttons (options) such as: "Define volume sizes...", "Rename automatically", "Multithreading" option added to "Benchmark and hardware test" command, new command lines, increased compression speed (5 -15%) for some data types. The publisher states that they fixed some bugs in the multithreaded text compression algorithm.
The speed versus the rate of compression came out as medium compared to WinAce and WinZip: a directory containing multimedia and text files in total size of 104 Mb compressed at a normal rate by WinRAR resulted in a 64 Mb in 51 seconds compared to 76,2 Mb in 17 seconds for WinZip and 64,2 Mb in 1 minute and 11 seconds for WinAce.
Drawbacks / flaws:
In conclusion: A good compression over a quite short archiving time sets WinRAR in a very good position among the well known archivers. The program is a very good and reliable archiving solution.
version reviewed: 3.61
WinRAR Publisher's Description WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager. WinRAR supports decompression of ZIP archives created using Zip64 format extension. Zip64 was introduced to remove original ZIP format limitations on archived file size. WinRAR's main features are very strong general and multimedia compression, processing of non-RAR archives, long filename support, programmable self-extracting archives (SFX), damaged archive repair, authenticity verification, embedded file comments, and encryption. This beta version of WinRAR includes an integrated GUI skinning engine. New options in "Advanced" part of extraction dialog:
a) "Delete archive" options allow to delete extracted archives;
b) "Check authenticity information" option controls processing of authenticity information in RAR archives.
-Now it is possible to change WinRAR's look by installing interface themes.Theme files are RAR archives, just open them in WinRAR to install. You can manage installed themes using "Options/Themes" menu.
-Added support of multivolume (multipart) CAB archives.
Wait if other WinRAR copies are active" option in "Advanced" parts of archiving and extraction dialogs.
If enabled, it waits while other WinRAR copies are creating, modifying or unpacking an archive and starts the operation only when other WinRAR tasks are complete. If you are going to perform several archiving or decompressing tasks, such queued execution can help to reduce the amount of disk seeks and improve overall performance.
Security changes:
a) WinRAR shell does not allow to run *.pif files. Archived PIF files is one of typical ways for computer viruses to distribute;
b) WinRAR shell does not allow to run files having 5 or more continuous spaces in the name. For example, "calc.txt .exe". Viruses frequently add such spaces to confuse users and hide the real extension. WinRAR shell removes these continuous spaces except first and last also when displaying names of such files in the file list.
In Windows XP WinRAR highlights the sorted column in the file list using the different color, like it is done in Windows Explorer. System Requirements 32MB RAM What's new Major update |
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