WinAce: Whether to Zip or ACE Whether to ZIP or ACE Scott Koegler
With 100-Gig hard drives selling for less than $100, why would anyone bother compressing files? Well, aside from simple conservation of space, it's often necessary to keep a group of files together for activities such as program installation and sharing files with other users via e-mail or FTP. In addition, compressed file collections can be protected by passwords and their contents verified to avoid corruption.
But once you decide to compress, or archive, your files, you still need to make a choice among a variety of compression formats. While the ZIP format has been a de facto standard among PC users, it definitely isn't the only format, and depending on who you ask, it may not be the best.
WinAce's ability to read a wide range of compression formats with grace effectively obviates the need to make a decision among the formats. It even makes the process of creating and using archived files fast and simple enough that you can put off buying that extra 200GB drive for a few more months.
As an archiver, WinAce does a solid job providing options. The program can deal with a wide variety of different file formats automatically. It handles both viewing and extracting of ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, RAR, ARC, ARJ, GZip, TAR, ZOO, and JAR files. And while the list of archive formats WinAce is able to create is not as extensive as the list of compressed files it can read, you're likely to be able to create the files you need most often, including ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, and JAVA JAR files.
If you have a preference for a particular archive file type, or if you believe the ACE archive format creates smaller files than the Zip format does, you can pick and choose between file types, and even control the ratio of compression versus speed of operation for any particular archiving task.
