We have WinZip and WinRAR,do we need more alternatives? Of course we do. 7-Zip may have more advantages than that it can compress better and that it’s free (under the GNU LGPL Licence).
It supports packing of 7z,ZIP,GZIP,BZIP2 and TAR files,and unpacking of 7z,ZIP,GZIP,BZIP2,TAR,RAR,CAB,ISO,ARJ,LZH,CHM,MSI,WIM,Z,CPIO,RPM,DEB and NSIS. And they says that:
7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. And 7-Zip compresses to zip format 2-10% better than most of other zip compatible programs.The current version of 7-Zip is 4.65(2009-02-03),and can be downloaded from their website.
The next version 9.12 beta have a lot of new features:(since before 9.04)
- 7-Zip now can update solid .7z archives.- 7-Zip now supports LZMA2 compression method.- 7-Zip now supports XZ archives.- 7-Zip now can unpack NTFS,FAT,VHD and MBR archives.- 7-Zip now can unpack GZip,BZip2,LZMA,XZ and TAR archives from stdin.- 7-Zip now can open/copy/compress disk images (like \\.\c:) from \\.\ folder.- 7-Zip File Manager now doesn't use temp files to open nested archives stored without compression.- New -scrc switch to calculate total CRC-32 during extracting / testing.- New -scc{WIN|DOS|UTF-8} switch to specify charset for console input/output (default = DOS).- 7-Zip now can unpack MSLZ archives.- Partial parsing for EXE resources,SWF and FLV.- It's possible to specify Diff program in options (7-Zip File Manager).- 7-Zip now can unpack Apple Partition Map (APM) disk images.- Speed optimizations in AES code for Intel's 32nm CPUs.- Speed optimizations in CRC calculation code for Intel's Atom CPUs.- 7-Zip now supports PPMd compression in ZIP archives.- Speed optimizations in PPMd codec.- The support for archives in installers was improved.- ZIP / PPMd compression ratio was improved in Maximum and Ultra modes.- Some bugs were fixed.
