Hello 7-Zip, goodbye Power Archiver

November 15, 2005 | In Developer, General

On the back of an ‘out of control’ Power Archiver having some uncontrolled process moments, high CPU usage and general hanging around - on the back of a 9.5 update, I’ve been hipped to the open source 7-Zip compression/archive tool and am running the 4.23 release as an alternative.

The key selling points:

High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU LGPL
Supported formats:
- Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
- Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM and DEB
For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that
is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
Self-extracting capability for 7z format
Integration with Windows Shell
Powerful File Manager
Powerful command line version
Plugin for FAR Manager
Localizations for 59 languages