WinRAR: A Worthy Competitor for WinZip? Formidable Competition for WinZip Joseph Moran
But while Windows XP provides basic ZIP capability, it's generally suitable only for neophyte users. That's why on the Windows platform, WinZip is about as ubiquitous as Starbucks and has been for years. Still, WinZip's not the only game in town. One noteworthy alternative is WinRAR from German publisher win.rar GmbH
Let's face it, in this age of outsized hard drives and files of equally generous proportions, file compression capabilities — and in the PC world that usually means ZIP — are a virtual necessity. But while Windows XP provides basic ZIP capability, it's generally suitable only for neophyte users. That's why on the Windows platform, WinZip is about as ubiquitous as Starbucks and has been for years. Still, WinZip's not the only game in town. One noteworthy alternative is WinRAR from German publisher win.rar GmbH.
The list of compression formats supported by WinRAR is indeed substantial. The program can unpack no fewer than 14 file compression types, including the eponymous RAR and the ubiquitous ZIP, as well open-source mainstays like TAR, CAB files — the staple of Windows OS distributions — and even ISO9660 CD image files. Suffice it to say that if WinRAR doesn't support it, it probably doesn't exist. Not surprisingly, WinRAR's default compression format is RAR but can be changed to ZIP.
To go up against the enormous popularity of an entrenched format like ZIP, RAR claims better compression than ZIP (though it does concede that ZIP files typically compress faster). We found this to essentially be the case. Using a test folder consisting of 202 MB of mixed data, WinRAR compressed the information into a 134 MB file, while the WinZip-ZIPped file was a much larger 184 MB. Conversely, WinZip was able to compress the data in just over two minutes (2:21), while WinRAR took somewhat longer at 3 minutes and 31 seconds. Like WinZip, WinRAR also offers multiple levels of compression that strike a balance between minimizing compression time and minimizing file size.
For users who may not need (or want) to navigate through WinRAR's considerable bells and whistles, there's a wizard available that guides the user through three basic tasks — creating an archive, unpacking one, and adding files to an existing archive. It's not quite as slick-looking as the one in WinZip (indeed, neither is the interface as a whole), but it gets the job done.
