ZIP archives have been around for ages and are extremely common. They were quick, easy and convenient to use. Windows, Mac and Linux all had built in ZIP support. Recently, however, things have changed. The RAR archive came along with higher compression rates which would mean smaller file sizes when you'd transfer them. For awhile RAR's were used in tight knit groups (Like the BitTorrent community), so the regular user never needed a program to extract RAR's. Lately that hasn't been the case. Every day more and more people are compressing using RAR's, even regular users. This means that friends and family need to also install a program to read those RAR files. There was one problem: The de-facto standard was WinRAR, which costs $29. This means using WinRAR in free mode with annoying popups asking you to buy OR buying it for $29. There must be a better way, though.. Well, there is!
Introducing 7-Zip (Click here to download), a very nice free alternative to WinRAR. It's fast, open source and has it's own compression format which has proven better than RAR in some tests. 7-Zip isn't ad supported, won't spam you with annoying popups and is integrated into the Windows Send To menu. This makes it easy to compress files without having to open up a program first. 7-Zip has no downsides, either. It's simple, easy to use and even sports a command line interface!
I really hope this article saved you some money before you went out and purchased WinRAR. I personally love WinRAR, but I don't love the price tag! You have nothing to lose by trying 7-Zip and can always switch back to WinRAR if you find you don't like it.
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