Hi,
Winzip has been here for quite some time now, and being the best in its category had the advantage of being the early leader. But WinRar clearly knocks the socks off Winzip.
To start with WinRar is much more stable and reliable than Winzip.
WinRar has a higher compression ratio than Winzip.
When it comes to user friendliness, Winzip is a tad(just a tad) friendlier than WinRar.
WinRar supports many many more archival formats than Winzip. Not only does WinRar support pretty much all the compression formats you can find, it also supports image archives like .iso.
(.iso is a format used to make disc images from compact disks. .iso files can then be written on recordable disks, so as to emulate the disks the files were made from.)
WinRar also supports repairing damaged archives but it needs that you create recovery records while archiving your files. RAR archive format supports a special type of redundant information called a recovery record. If an archive has a recovery record, it can be repaired even in case of physical data damage due to floppy disk failure or data losses of any other kind. The ZIP archive format does not support a recovery record.
If a damaged archive does not contain a recovery record or if the archive cannot be completely recovered due to severe damage.
You can also create profiles in WinRar, which is useful in case you want to archive the same kind of files again and again.
Compression profile is a set of different compression options, which can be quickly retrieved before starting an archiving operation. Instead of specifying an archive type, a volume size, a compression method and other options each time when you need to make a new archive; you may create several profiles storing options for your typical archiving operations and later select a required profile from the menu to restore all the options.
WinRar also supports password protection and encryption of files.
WinRar can also lock archives. The locked archive cannot be modified by WinRAR. You may lock important archives to prevent their accidental modification.
The best feature of WinRar over winzip is the solid archiving feature of WinRar.
A solid archive is a RAR archive packed by a special compression method, which treats all files, within the archive, as one continuous data stream. Solid archives are supported only by the RAR archiving format, ZIP archives are always non-solid. The archiving method for RAR archives is a user selectable option and may be Solid or non-Solid.
WinRar supports volume archiving(or split archiving).Volumes are parts of a split archive. Volumes are supported only by the RAR archive format, so you cannot create ZIP volumes. Generally volumes are used to store a large archive on several diskettes or other removable media.
Suppose you have a 10 MB file that you want to compress and take it somewhere but you don?t want to use(or don’t have) a CD-Writer, You can use WinRar to compress it to(say) 8MB and then split into 8 volumes of sizes 1MB each. You can then use 8 floppy drives to copy and transport it.
Like Winzip WinRar also supports self extracting archives, but the self extracting archives created by WinRar are much faster and smaller.
WinRar also has an internal viewer to view text or html files. You can view text or html files in a split screen.
Just like Winzip WinRar can also integrate with the windows Shell. So you can just right click on a file in the windows explorer and create an archive or add it to an existing archive.
As is that was not enough WinRar also has a command line utility for the nerds.
These are a few of the main features, WinRar supports a host of other features that you will realise when you use it. So go ahead and dump Winzip, its time for the next generation to take over.
You can download WinRar from https://rarlabs.com .
happy zippin!
Thankyou,
luckyrocker
luckyrocker