Netbook Network

When most people see .zip or .rar files, they think of programs like WinZip or WinRAR – both capable of uncompressing the files. The key issue is, both WinZip and WinRAR cost quite a lot of money. The great news is that there are free alternatives available. The one I’ll be covering today is a free archive manager called 7-zip, and it’s great for netbook and desktop users alike.

7-zip supports a huge array of formats. Most notably, is 7-zip’s own archive format, .7z. It’s got an extremely high compression ratio through LZMA compression, and can be up to 30% smaller in size compared to the .zip and .rar format. 7-zip supports packing and unpacking of these formats: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR – and 7-zip can unpack these formats: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

7-Zip is a lot like WinZip or WinRAR – it integrates into the Windows context menu, also known as the right click menu for easy compression and extraction. However, both Winrar and Winzip take up a lot of space on the context menu – and netbook owners don’t have very much screen space to deal with. 7-zip will pack all the options and settings under a nice right click menu, as displayed above.

If you choose to compress a folder or set of folders and files, you’ll be presented with a neatly organized options menu (click to enlarge). You can change the level of compression (more compression equals more time), create a self extracting archive where you can extract the contents without an archive manager, and even set a password to encrypt your archives. The process is very straightforward and much cleaner than what I’ve seen on WinZip and WinRAR.

In the end, 7-zip is a great archive manager that all people should use, with a wide array of features that even paid programs don’t support. And the best part is, 7-zip is completely free and open source. 7-zip works on both Windows XP and Windows 7. There’s even a version for Linux users. Download links and more information can be found at 7-zip’s homepage, which can be found here. Happy compressing!