Best Program used to compress files

[ringfinger]

WinRAR till death... or better overall compression ratios from some other app

[Lost Soul]

i prefer winrar but 7zip can compress a file further

[Martijn]

7Zip all the way, it's also very fast

[Fr33m4n]

uharc is really good but I think winrar is simpler so I'm sticking with it.

[EchoNoise]

Hahaha... I was thinking of things like UPX

My vote 7z

[LLXX]

LZH/LH7, compresses faster than RAR but size is even with RAR.

(LZH is a popular archive format in Japan)

[Rocky619]

I like WINRAR the best. I use WinRAR corperate edition

[spazmire11]

combo of eather 7-zip or winrar depending on witch give best compression

[boooggy]

i use winrar and 7zip...

[hbinded]

I prefer winrar. It's more user friendly and most files are distributed in .rar format

[WolfX2]

i use winace, probably because i'm never ziping any files, always unzip

[Ophiel X]

winRAR all the way. i only have half a gig of ram, so usually winRAR actually provides me with better compression.

rarely i can squeeze a file a little smaller with 7zip, but i stopped using it because i prefer the popularity of RAR files.

Edited June 2, 2006 by Ophiel X

[Noggin]

winRAR definitely

I used winZIP once but it crashed on me.

So I have trusted winRAR ever since

Edited June 18, 2006 by Noggin

[trickytwista]

my preference is winrar

[Jeremy]

WinRAR has the best "feel" for me.

7-zip will give you better compression though. The only downside - the Ultra settings requires 512MB of RAM on your system, otherwise, you'll end up sitting there for about 2 hours to compress a 10MB archive.

Or 50 hours compressing a 3.8 GB game. I tried it. It was only going to save me 400MBs more than the Ultra compression under default word and dictionary size. I can go up to 272 word size but only 64MB dict. size because I have 1GB of RAM. My girlfriend has my other GB because her Samsung generic was causing her PC to shut off during load.

On a lighter note, I was able to compress 1700 Adobe Photoshop plugins (which were 100+ MBs) to 700 KBs using 7-Zip on max compression. Isn't that something? I was also able to compress an administrator's install of Photoshop to 121 MBs.

Edited June 22, 2006 by Jeremy