The menus in WinZip are not very well balanced. You cannot browse through your computer inside WinZip if you want to open an archive, you'll have to use the Open button (or CTRL+O). The first thing you'll notice missing will probably be the file browser. Although the buttons (as functionality, but also as design) are very good choices, the fact that they're not customizable (you cannot remove the text or make them smaller) is an important minus. The main screen has a simple interface, with buttons for the most important functions at the top. Probably the archiver everyone has heard about, WinZip presents itself as a very user friendly and easy to use application. Before I start making an analysis on them, I must mention two things: First of all, this review is mostly a guide for beginners, so they should know what to expect (that's why I did not made complex tests about their performance, just compressed a few types of files that almost anybody uses) second: I did not use only my personal computer for these tests (not everybody has a 3200 MHz processor and I felt the need to present realistic compression times, but also confirmed on another computer). The top three programs were: WinRAR, WinAce, WinZIP. I went on Softpedia's Compression Tools category and sorted shareware archivers by downloads. So what do we do to bring their size closer to these kind of files? We, of course, shrink them by using a compression tool. Everybody uses different types of files, most of them are compressed, but still a DOC, BMP or WAV are sometimes necessary, although their size is a lot bigger than other file types in their category. As such, no residual file remains in your target directory and the operating system will dispose of the temporary file when it sees appropriate.Some like to say that size doesn't matter, but when it comes to files on my computer, I must certainly disagree.
If the decompression fails, there's no guarantee the program performing the operation cleans up after itself. Regarding the use of a temporary directory, this is so to follow many operating system guidelines. The worst thing that can happen to a page file. Paging under these circumstances would be a lot slower than just using the filesystem because the file is still being decompressed (and page files keep being added), but also because as the file is being decompressed, it is being checked for errors and there's as such a lot of read/write operations. Under low memory conditions, or for large compressed files this would sooner or later exhaust available memory and start the process of memory paging. If they didn't use the filesystem, decompression would happen in memory. It is done so memory requirements for decompression are kept to a minimum. I learned this the hard way several years ago when I wanted to implement drag-and-drop in a program I was writing. If you specify the folder and click Extract, it extracts and no further processing is done.įeel free to peruse the source-code for 7-Zip to see how extraction location is handled. When you drag it out to a folder, it extracts, then you see Explorer’s standard file operation dialog moving it to the folder. You can see this clearly by extracting a large file using both methods. As a result, the program cannot know where to extract them, and so simply extracts them to the temp folder, then Explorer moves them once it’s done. In other words, it is Explorer that receives the target folder, not the archiving program. However, if you merely drag the files, then due to how the drag-and-drop function of OLE works, the program does not know where the target folder is.
If you enter the target folder or use the context-menu item, then the program knows exactly where it needs to extract to. The reason is in how the destination is selected. If you select the files in the UI and drag them to the target folder, then it will extract to a temporary folder. If you enter a destination folder and then select the extract function or use the shell-extension, then they do not extract to a temporary folder first, they extract directly to the destination. How exactly are you extracting the files? Are you using the command-line or the GUI? Are you dragging the files or selecting them and using the extract function? Are you using the shell-extension context-menu?