Do you need a powerful tool for compressing files and folders? I don't doubt that you have already got this kind of program. Nevertheless, let me introduce to your attention one more mighty and potent software for these purposes.

7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It supports such formats as 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO and RPM. Also, 7-Zip possesses self-extracting capability for 7z format.

The first thing on the basis of which we judge the program is the interface. In case of 7-Zip I should say that personally me I wasn't impressed by its interface at all. On the place of the creators of this software I would think about better interface or at list skinable one.

Speaking about the main properties of 7-Zip it must be mentioned that 7-Zip creates fully ZIP compatible archives. It means that everyone can decompress these files by any ZIP compatible decompression utility and can extract any files from ZIP archive.

Supporting already existed formats, this program presents users 7-Zip format, which is a new archive format, providing high compression ratio. Also, it has open architecture, so it can support any new compression methods. LZMA is the default and general compression method of 7z format. This compression algorithm is very suitable for embedded applications.

To estimate 7-Zip I compared it with such popular software of this kind as WinRAR 3.10 and WinZip 10.0. The compression ratio results are very dependent upon the data used for the tests, that's why I used these archivers for compressing different text, audio and picture files. Thus, according to my experiments, I should say that while compressing audio files, WinRAR, WinZip and 7-Zip shown approximately equal results, the same may be said about the compression of picture files, but as for text word's files, here 7-Zip achieved brilliant figures. For example, one file having the size of 29 kb was compressed by this program up to 4.5 kb, whereas RAR compressed it up to 18 kb and WinZip up to 5.2 kb.

In the whole, according to all above mentioned, I can say that 7-Zip as a really powerful archiver, which main weapon is its own algorithm LZMA. The files compressed in 7-Zip format, as usual, 1.5-5 times less than their ZIP analogues. Moreover, 7-Zip wins against WinRAR on 10-30% at approximately the same speed of compression. I appreciated, also, its good integration with windows shell, powerful file manager, localizations for 63 languages and some other useful features.

However, this software has some minuses. As it was already mentioned, its interface is primitive enough in the comparison with the competitors. Then, there isn't files' protection from damages. At the same time, it would be desirable if this potent program has multimedia compression for audio, pictures and other files and multimedia filters. Besides, I think it would be very impressive if there was more explorer integration features, such as the ability to preview the files in an archived file when hovering the mouse over that file. Also, the option to uncompress into a similarly named folder in the right click menu.

At any case, 7-Zip is free software and its initial codes and library are available, that's why skilled users will be able to build the algorithm LZMA into their workings. In this way, I think that 7-Zip has the potency to become gradually one of the main formats in other multiarchivers.

7-Zip keywords: 7-zip, zip, 7z, archiver, compression, unzip, compress, compressor, high, ratio, fast, command, line, gnu