WindowsXP and Winzip

[leoric1928]

hello to all,

   I've just notice that windows xp OS can already unextract zip files, i think this is another anti trust case, what do you think?


tnx

[hm_murdock]

doubtful, as file archiving utilities have been packaged with OSes since early UNICES in the form of the tar program.

Mac OS 10.3 Panther also supports arch/de-arch within the shell. MS's unzipper is pretty bare-bones and in no way can compete with winzip.

Winzip supports about 15 or 20 different formats including tar, gzip, sit, hqx, bin, and I think lha and arc... the "compressed folders" in windows aren't even fully zip compatible.

[Stryker]

any os should be able to do that, microsoft has had it since windows ME. and i've never had to pay for using winzip.

[ciaran]

all it is is the old ms-dos pkunzip utility, which has been around since i was using windows 3.11 (most stable version of windows EVER), without the "hassle" of using it from the dos prompt...

[ August 28, 2003: Message edited by: ciaran ]

[bigsleep]

You can add the free DOS version of PKZip to the right-click menu in any version of Windows, however I prefer RarLab's WinRar.
Microsoft is lame for not doing it 8 years ago.

[Calum]

i prefer tar, bzip2 and gzip myself, but that is because they are open source and create smaller archives, while retaining file permissions. By this logic, i prefer FreeDOS pkzip to anything from RARsoft, since PKzip is closed source. HOWEVER if you use linux, you can get rar and unrar for free from RARsoft, while you still need to pay for the windows version after 40 days (but now i think about it the DOS version might be free too)

[bigsleep]

I don't know, I paid for WinRar because I like it, and I can extract gzip, Unix archives, as well as cab files and even attachments in mail files.
Unlike PKZip, RarLabs updates their compression - which could be considered bad because you have to update your rar extractor. But don't we want better compression?

[mobrien_12]

quote:Originally posted by Stryker:
any os should be able to do that, microsoft has had it since windows ME. and i've never had to pay for using winzip.

Winzip is not freeware.

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by M. O'Brien:


Winzip is not freeware.

it let me use it without paying, never forced me to pay for anything. it said if i paid it would stop showing a dialog box each time it opened though.

[Faust]

quote:But don't we want better compression?

Yeah, that's why he uses bz and gz.  They compress far better than rar files.  Try making tgz and tbz archives of a large amount of code (linux kernel does nicely) and compare them to a rared copy.

[wargames_guru]

quote:Originally posted by Stryker:

it let me use it without paying, never forced me to pay for anything. it said if i paid it would stop showing a dialog box each time it opened though.

to get rid of that dialog box, one just has to "hack" the registry to "fix" that little annoyance!!