PowerArchiver 2006: The New King of Compression? Compression Competition for WinZip and PKZIP Wayne Kawamoto
Compression software is a true remnant of old-school MS-DOS. Despite our modern age of 100-plus gigabyte hard drives and speedy internet connections, file compression utilities still maintain a useful place. And among such utilities, PowerArchiver is an excellent one. This utility program offers a wealth of features for power users while remaining easy enough for novices to quickly master. Either way, everyone wins with more storage real estate and faster e-mail transmission times.
Like other compression utilities, ConXware's PowerArchiver lets you save files in compressed formats so they're smaller, take up less space on a hard drive, and are faster to send as e-mail attachments. It's the equivalent of sitting on a suitcase to cram all of those souvenirs that you purchased on vacation.
With all that PowerArchiver does, its developers must have had to use a compression utility themselves to squeeze in its many features. The program offers lots of options and supports a dizzying array of compression standards. And despite this, PowerArchiver is easy to learn and use.
According to its publisher, PowerArchiver version 9.26 was the final release of PowerArchiver 2004, with PowerArchiver 2006 next in line — and recently officially released as v9.50. The v9.26 release offered minor tweaks and bug fixes and resolved a potential security issue to go along with the improved ability to handle corrupted ZIP files, faster compression of files, integrated support of a Microsoft Outlook plug-in, and a reduction in installer size.
ConXware is looking to take the compression utility to an entirely new level with a bevy of new and improved features making their debut in PowerArchiver 2006, including improved security, support for 7-Zip PPMd compression, SFTP (SSH FTP) support for secure FTP transfers, shell extension support for 64-bit Windows, full skinning support, and a new alert window in system tray.
Sitting on the Suitcase
On paper, the program sounds like a sterile utility that's solely for power users. While these users will appreciate the program's flexibility and comprehensive feature set, it's clearly not beyond the grasp of novices.
Those who are new to compression will appreciate the intuitive wizard that walks you through the process of adding files and folders, filtering them based on your preferences, adding password protection, and applying one of five different compressions formats. In addition, there's an impressive option that allows you to send an archived file to an FTP server.
Experienced practitioners, on the other hand, will be able to dive right in and immediately use the program, likely taking advantage of PowerArchiver's convenient integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer. For this, the program lets you compress, extract, and encrypt files with a single click from within Explorer — all without having to open PowerArchiver. The program also offers an option to use an Explorer-like interface to browse a hard drive for archives.
PowerArchiver stores frequently-used compression settings so you can simply select a profile to save time. There's also a convenient viewer that supports a variety of graphic formats, including Photoshop, Autodesk, Paintbrush, Photo-CD, PaintShop Pro, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF and more, as well
as basic text files.
Everyone can have fun with the "skinnable" toolbar that displays fun icons of a user's choosing. This toolbar may be docked to the side of an application or allowed to float on the screen so it's easily accessed.
