Ace on Tech: Stardust Ed.

7Zip is an open-source compression/decompression utility that supports most of the popular compression formats. In addition, it also introduces its own high-performing format called LZMA. According to the 7Zip, LZMA supports:

• a high compression ratio
• compression speed of 1MB/s and higher (based on a 2GHz CPU)
• decompression speed of 10 to 20 MB/s (ditto)
• low system requirements
• multi-threading and hyper-threading

Not only does it support regular ZIP, its compression ratio for ZIP is 2 to 10% higher than the its commercial counterpart, WinZip. In true open-source fashion, 7Zip is available in more than 60 languages and can be used on older computers without too much trouble. Furthermore, it comes with a custom file manager that allows advanced functionality like:

• splitting files
• combining files
• calculating checksums of files

If you’re not (or can’t be) tied to a single computer and you prefer to carry your applications around on a USB-stick, there’s a portable version available at PortableApps.com, too. Sure, it doesn’t support every single possible format like WinRAR does, but it does a heck of a good job. And hey, it’s free!

7-Zip is available for Windows, Linux, Mac and most other Operating Systems out there on their official download page.

Get the portable version of 7-Zip here (Windows Only).

Supported Formats

Compression and decompression:

• 7z
• ZIP
• GZIP
• BZIP2
• TAR

Decompression only:

• RAR
• CAB
• ARJ
• Z
• RPM, DEB
• ISO
• And others…

Tags: compression, open-source, zip

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Software Picks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.