WinRAR: A Worthy Competitor for WinZip? Convenience Joseph Moran
Convenience
Like WinZip, WinRAR offers a combination of context menus and integration with e-mail clients that makes it a matter of a few mouse clicks to compress files and send them to a recipient, all without the need to open multiple applications. WinRAR also provides a useful – and powerful – find feature that can search for particular files as well as for text strings within archive files.
WinRAR boasts a number of unique features designed to make working with compressed files more convenient and more reliable. It's worth highlighting, though, that most of these are inherent to the RAR format and not the WinRAR application itself. Thus they're unavailable when compressing to ZIP or other formats. That's the case for the features mentioned below unless otherwise stated.
If you often work with very large compressed files that span multiple disks, you'll appreciate WinRAR's ability to create multi-volume archives. This lets you create a RAR file in pre-defined size chunks to fit a 1.44MB floppy, ZIP 100 disc, or a 650 or 700MB-formatted CD-R. This can be more convenient than WinZip's disk spanning, which lets a ZIP file span multiple disks but requires you to create the file on the removable disk and feed additional disks as each one fills up.
Who among us hasn't attempted to compress down a file or folder only to find that the resulting compressed file was only negligibly smaller (or even sometimes slightly larger) than the source data? In an attempt to eliminate the guesswork that comes with file compression — especially when dealing with mixed data of varied compression potential — WinRAR offers a "Compression Prognosis" feature.
As its name suggests, Compression Prognosis lets you select any file or folder and then have WinRAR offer an estimate as to how well the data will compress (expressed as a percentage), how long the process will take, and what the resulting file size will be. After using this feature on a number of different files and folders of various sizes, we found WinRAR's size predictions to be essentially on the mark and its time forecasts to be slightly conservative. Our only complaint is that a feature this handy should be accessible right off the main toolbar or on a context menu. Unfortunately, you must first view the "Show Info" window on a target to expose it.
