To extract and compress your files, 7-Zip is a perfectly viable alternative to the better known WinZip or WinRAR. The application works exactly like its main competitors yet manages to mix in WinZip’s selection of tools with WinRAR’s versatility.

The 7-Zip interface is similar to that of its competitors, with a main file manager and a command line to search and select files to extract or compress. The control panel is comprised of the essential buttons like extract, add and test, but also features copy, move and delete functions to allow you to manage your files. 7-Zip extracts and compresses files as fast as WinZip and WinRAR and handles the main archive formats like ZIP, TAR, RAR and ISO.

The archiving process is where 7-Zip differs most from its rivals. Where WinZip only lets you compress to ZIP and WinRAR to RAR or ZIP, 7zip offers you up to 5 different archive formats to choose from. The application lets you choose the update mode, depending on whether you want to add and replace files, refresh the archive or just synchronize files. If you don’t want somebody opening up your archive without your permission, you can set a password to protect your archive.We particularly liked the split tool because it can cut up your archive into equal parts which fit on a floppy, CD or DVD, handy if you need to distribute a particularly large archive.

Security is where 7-Zip lags behind its main rivals. There is no option to scan archives for viruses and you can’t repair damaged or corrupted files. While you can set a password to protect your archive, you can’t choose between different levels of encryption.

7-Zip might not be as secure as WinZip or WinRAR but it is definitely more versatile. It works with more archive formats and offers many useful tools like update mode or splitting. If you feel too limited by WinZip and if you don’t like WinRAR we suggest giving 7-Zip a try and taking advantage of all its possibilities.

Download 7-Zip 4.60 in Softonic

freeCommander is an easy-to-use alternative to the standard windows file manager. The program helps you with daily work in Windows. Here you can find all the necessary functions to manage your data stock.

You can take freeCommander anywhere - just copy the installation directory on a CD, USB-Stick or even a floppy disk - and you can even work with this program on a foreign computer.

This is what freeCommander has to offer:

• Dual-panel technology - horizontal and vertical
• Optional tree view for each panel
• Built in file viewer to view files in hex, binary, text or image format
• File viewer inside archives too
• Built in archive handling: ZIP (read, write), CAB (read, write), RAR (read)
• Nested archive handling
• Easy access to system folders, control panel, desktop and start menu
• Copy, move, delete, rename files and folders
• Wipe files
• Create and verify MD5 checksums
• File splitting
• File properties and context menu
• Calculation of folder size
• Folder comparison / synchronization
• Modification of file date and attributes
• Folder / program favorites
• File searching (inside archive too)
• File filters for display
• User defined columns for detailed view

Download freeCommander 2008.06a in Softonic

Some anti-virus programs cause more problems than they solve. Avast! Home Edition anti-virus is thankfully not one of those as it exceeds expectations while remaining free. Lightweight, vigilant and most importantly, effective, this could be the answer to your prayers if you’ve had no luck finding a virus checker you like.

The developers make a point of stressing that this program is strictly not for institutional use – it is designed specifically for the threats most home users face daily. Their philosophy is that efficient home virus protection is essential in preventing users one day being struck by a serious global virus. What impresses you immediately with Avast! is its vigilance. It’s likely that within minutes of installation, you’ll receive a pop up alert due to a Trojan or virus that had been incubating on your PC. If not, rest assured that it won’t be long before Avast! sets off its trademark siren and alerts you that something has been detected. The latest version of

Avast’s antivirus kernel promises 100% detection of ‘In-the-Wild’ viruses (viruses already spreading between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses. Avast! provides 24 hour protection via its ‘On-Access’ scanner but you can initiate manual scans via the fairly simple user interface. You can start additional modules from here, such as the Virus Chest, Updater or Log Viewer. Another great feature of Avast! is the option to change the skin of this interface. The developer website features practically hundreds of distinctive designs made by aficionados and even offers a guide to designing your own.

Something often overlooked by major virus checking packages is P2P applications installed on your PC but Avast! covers this with a P2P and Instant Messenger shield. Whilst chat applications themselves do not impose any serious security risks in terms of viruses, their less sophisticated file sharing methods can easily lead to virus infections if not properly monitored. With so many infected files on P2P networks such as Kazaa and eMule too, it’s also good to know that Avast! won’t let you open them without quietly checking them first.

The program also features both a Web and Network shield that constantly monitors traffic. The Web Shield acts as a transparent HTTP proxy and is compatible with all major web browsers. One of the truly outstanding features of Avast! is that unlike heavyweights such as Kaspersky or Norton, you hardly notice it working in the background. This is because of a unique feature the developers call ‘Intelligent Stream Scan’ that scans objects on-the-fly, without needing to cache them locally. Even the virus updates are unobtrusive. Avast! downloads the updates gradually and only those that are absolutely essential instead of the whole database. You receive a ‘Virus database has been updated’ voice message every time this has been completed along with a small popup which you can turn off if it annoys you.

There really is little to fault Avast! on in a market that is saturated with too many ineffective virus checkers. Although it doesn’t guzzle resources, if you’re running it on an older machine, you might find it slows you down. Some new users also complain that conducting a simple manual scan is more complicated than it should be but if you’ve spent anytime with virus checkers, you’ll realise that its more than worth your while getting to know this excellent program.

Download Avast! Home 4.8.1229 in Softonic

If you have lots of photos, music, software and documents then it's probably a good idea to begin making backup copies, so that you have everything conveniently stored in CD or DVD. But how can you manage such a collection?

The answer is CD Archiver. This program helps you create an organized catalogue of all your recorded CD and DVD in a very easy way: insert a disc in the drive, choose or create the appropriate category and CD Archiver will read it and store its index of contents in the database. Be warned that, although almost fully automated, the whole process can take a while as the program is a bit slow indexing large discs.

Once you have your database, you can see a nice graphic that displays the distribution and percentages of file types but, what's more important, you'll be able to search for any file with the embedded search engine, without having to check discs one by one.

Download CD Archiver 5.3.3067 in Softonic

When your CD collection outgrows all the available shelves of your bookcase, you know it's time for a bit of organization. And the easiest way to organize a CD collection is by creating a catalog.

Visual CD enables you to create that CD catalog in just a few simple steps. Insert the disk into the CD drive, let Visual CD index its contents and save it as a fully searchable catalog. This means that you can later on explore, search and find files that are saved on CD even if the physical disc is not in the drive.

Visual CD doesn't work only with CD: it also supports DVD, floppy disks, removable hard drives and even folders in your system hard drive. What strikes me is the fact that each drive you explore must be saved as a new catalog, whereas other similar tools save explored drives as categories inside one single catalog.

The program features also very interesting advanced functions such as a duplicate files finder, a file splitter, a photo renaming tool, a playlist generator and a thumbnail maker, among others.

Visual CD lets you save the contents of your CD and DVD in separate catalogs so that you can browse and search your collection without having to insert each disk one by one

Download Visual CD 3.1 in Softonic

If you're tired of being bugged by WinZip to upgrade or register and don't mind using something slightly different, then ALZip is an excellent solution.

AlZip is compatible with all ZIP and compressed file types and best of all, it's completely free for home use so there's no annoying nag screen or usage period to worry about. But much more than that, AlZip allows you to choose which program you want to open a certain file with rather than autoselect one for you or open it as generic Windows file. It's also a good option for unzipping files that have been downloaded from eMule or other P2P networks because it scans them for malware or viruses before opening them. The one thing that strikes you about this program though is how easy it is to use - you're grandma could probably unzip files with this program easily. It takes you through the unzipping process gently and doesn't hide decompressed files in some inconvenient location like some programs do. It also doesn't require any plugins or add ons to enhance its functionality or deal with certain file times - it's all in the program anyway. The latest release is ultra fast and they've implemented a new update and restore option for repeated tasks.

For a comprehensive, easy to use and powerful decompression tool, ALZip is all you need to banish those zipper blues.

Download ALZip 7.0 in Softonic

It's been a while since anything came along that could possibly rival WinZIP or WinRAR in terms of speed and compression/decompression power but ZipItFree gives them a good run for their money.

Apart from anything else, the best thing to start off with is by stating this is completely free - no annoying registrations or fees to pay. It's also now fully functional with Vista with an appropriate modern and stylish interface that gives you the feel that you're dealing with a quality piece of software. The key selling point of this program however is the way it compresses files using what the developers call the "Black Hole" method which provides very high compression ratios and ultra fast decompression. The other major selling point is what they call the ZipV2 encryption algorithm which they describe as "by far the most secure encryption for archiving (hundreds of times more secure than even the leading AES encryption)".

How secure this format is is debatable but the fact is that it's certainly one of the less utilised compression ratios that should mean it's less liable to attack. Apart from the fact that it handles multiple formats with ease, what's also nice is that you can leave comments on your archives describing what the archive contains so you don't have to go to the hassle of unzipping it all.

For a free, stylish and powerful alternative to WinZIP and WinRAR, ZipItFree is one of the most impressive efforts out there.

Download ZipItFree 1.80 in Softonic

7-Zip Portable is the popular 7-Zip packaged as a portable app, so you can take your file archiver with you and work with your compressed 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR files and more on the go. You can place it on your USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive or a CD and use it on any computer, without leaving any personal information behind.

7-Zip is a file archiver utility for Windows with a great array of features including:

• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than PKZip and WinZip
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Powerful File Manager
• Localizations for 63 languages

Download 7-Zip Portable 4.57 in Softonic

FileLocator Pro offers the most affordable way to exhaustively search your computer for all your important data. Unlike other search products FileLocator Pro does not consider any file too small or insignificant to examine. Find out why many Windows XP users are switching to FileLocator Pro today!

Main Features:

• ZIP, RAR, and CAB file searching
• PDF searching
• Basic Word Doc searching
• Active Scripting support for the ultimate in search customization
• LAN/WAN network drives searching (UNC support)
• Export search results in Text, CSV, HTML, or XML
• Surrounding lines of text option
• Regular Expression and Boolean Search support on Filename, Contents & Folder names
• Built-in file viewer
• Option to launch external editor at current line (including Visual Studio.NET)
• Drag and drop support
• Print preview

Download FileLocator Pro 4.0.787 in Softonic

WinAce is not just another archiving shell. With it's own powerful compression format ACE and built-in support for other popular compression types like ZIP, RAR and MS-CAB (to name a few), WinAce could actually become the only archiver you need.

The feature list of WinAce includes:

• Compression of the following formats: ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, JAVA JAR
• Decompression of: ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, RAR, ARC, ARJ, GZip, TAR, ZOO, JAR
• Multi-volume (disk spanning) archives for ACE, ZIP, CAB
• Self-extracting archives (SFX) for ACE and ZIP
• Password encryption & recovery records for data protection
• Integrity check for ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, RAR, ARC, ARJ, GZip, TAR, ZOO, JAR
• Repair functionality for ACE and ZIP archives
• Authenticity verification for ACE archives
• Comment files in HTML, ANSI or ASCII for ACE- and ZIP-Archives
• Full command line access (compatible with DOS ACE)
• Detailed information for all archive types
• Quickviewer for graphic files, Word Documents, HTML pages and ASCII files
• Full drag&drop support
• Complete file-management (copying, moving and deleting of files and directories)
• Optimization of existing archives
• Access to your archives in Windows Explorer and via the context menu (shell extension)
• Table of contents in the "Properties" panel of ACE and ZIP files (shell extension)

Download WinAce 2.69 in Softonic

SpeedCommander is a comfortable file manager. It builds on the proven two window technology and offers a multitude of exclusive features. Sort, copy, move or delete your files either using the keyboard or the mouse.

SpeedCommander reads and creates ZIP archives, Microsoft CAB files and fully supports ten additional compression formats. The newly expanded search feature will find files within all ten supported Archive formats. The internal file viewer displays over 100 graphics and text formats.

In addition, SpeedCommander contains a powerful text editor with numerous extras including syntax highlighting. With the integrated FTP client, you can both download files from the net and upload your own web pages. SpeedCommander even integrates a web browser for you to surf the web!

Download SpeedCommander 12.0 Beta 3 in Softonic

Stealing the crown from WinZip, the previously undisputed king of file compression apps, WinRAR is a must-have in any modern-day PC toolkit. The application not only includes support for extracting virtually any kind of file compression format, it also boasts a no-nonsense approach to reducing file sizes.

Some will argue that the application isn’t as quick as WinZip at compressing files. However, for the small lag in time difference, you end up with a significantly smaller archived file at the end of the process with WinRAR. What’s more, the application allows you to save files into both ZIP and RAR formats, with a multitude of options for speeding up compression times, or reducing file sizes at the expense of a few more seconds.

Although many newcomers might be put off by the sheer range of features and settings within the program, the interface doesn’t take long to get accustomed to, and if you’re still really stuck there’s a simple wizard-based system that walks you through the process of extracting or compressing. All this adds up to make WinRAR a dependable utility that performs better than any other tool in its class.

Download WinRAR 3.71 in Softonic

Have you ever lost a file that you were sure was on your system? EF Find is a powerful search program for Windows that can search for not only lost files but also text, HEX sequences and regular expressions inside archives.

This is a great tool for those of you that want a certain document but simply can't remember the name of the file. So if you've written a document about networks but just gave the document a generic name, you can search for 'networks' in EF Find, and even if it's in a compressed file, it will find it. The range of files it can search is really impressive and extends to 7-Zip, ACE, ARC, ARJ, BZIP2, CAB, CPIO, GZIP, IMG, ISO (ISO9660), LHA, RAR, RPM, SFX, SQX, TAR, TBZ, TGZ, ZIP and ZOO files.

The interface is a simple GUI with the search bar at the top. You can also filter searches in various ways including to make it case sensitive and within certain folders. This program has proved so popular that it's now been translated into 23 languages which gives some measure of how useful it is. The only downside is that it can't search within documents that aren't compressed so as long as you've got lots of zipped-up files, you'll love this.

Download EF Find XP 4.20 in Softonic

With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools.

It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, create self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, convert from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more.

Download IZArc 3.81.1550 in Softonic

ZArc2Go is portable version of IZArc. Just drop it on any USB Flash Drive and you will have full functional archive utility wherever you go, without havinf to install anything on the computer's hard disk.

IZArc2Go has all features of IZArc except that it can’t be integrated into the Explorer shell menu and it is not possible to associate any archive file type with it. The program keeps all its settings in its application folder and doesn't leave any secure information after it is closed.

Simply follow the steps to install IZArc2Go on your USB Flash Drive. After the setup is finished you can launch IZArc2Go by double-clicking on IZArc2Go.exe file.

Download IZArc2Go 3.81.1550 in Softonic

FileSee is a powerful All-In-One file viewer. It is a tool that helps you to view files quickly. FileSee is a mixtinite of Text file viewer, image viewer, pdf viewer, flash player, mp3 player, midi player, hex file editor, html viewer, Zip file decompresser, filename manager, desktop searching engine, dll viewer, wav2mp3 converter, pdf text extracter, etc. FileSee has Windows Explorer similar interface.

Download FileSee 6.21 in Softonic

Broken Cross Disk Manager is a Shareware program for managing and archiving disks of any kind (CDs, DVDs, floppies) on Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. It's available as both an ANSI and an Unicode version.

The content of cataloged disks is saved to compact database files, which can also be stored on network shares. The program uses its own optimized database engine. No other programs or modules are required.

To get a better overview of your cataloged disks, you can sort them into folders and you can assign user-defined categories to items. To search for files, the program offers search option like date, size etc. And you can restrict the search to specific categories. Of course, the search function does support wildcards as well.

Broken Cross Disk Manager supports 7-ZIP, ACE, ARJ, CAB, JAR, RAR, TAR and ZIP archives, it can read the packed directory structure and search in it too. You can create user-definable listings of items in the database which you can then print or export to XML, Text and CSV files. This applies as well to search results. You can protect folders with a password, either with or without encryption of item names.

Download Broken Cross Disk Manager 4.10 Build 2273 in Softonic

TUGZip is a powerful award-winning freeware archiving utility for Windows® that provides support for a wide range of compressed, encoded and disc-image files, as well as very powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

Features:

• Supports ZIP, 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, BH, BZ2, CAB, CPIO, DEB, GCA, GZ, IMP, JAR, LHA (LZH), LIB, RAR, RPM, SQX, TAR, TGZ, TBZ, TAZ, YZ1 and ZOO archives
• Supports BIN, C2D, IMG, ISO and NRG disc-images
• Support for external plugins
• Windows® shell integration, e.g. drag & drop, shell context menu and drop handlers
• Create 7-ZIP, BH, BZ2, CAB, JAR, LHA (LZH), SQX, TAR, TGZ, YZ1 and ZIP archives
• Script support which allows you to make automated backups
• Basic features like: add, extract, delete, rename, run, view, checkout, install, test, comment, SFX, virus-scanning, disk-spanning and much more
• Repair corrupted ZIP and SQX archives
• Can extract multiple archives at once using Multi Extract
• Encrypt archives using 6 different algorithms. Blowfish (128-bit), DES (56-bit), Triple DES (168-bit) and Rijndael (128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit).
• Create self-extracting encrypted archives
• Automatic updates using the "Web Update" function

Download TUGZip 3.4.0.2 in Softonic

Turbo Searcher provides a powerful engine for searching ASCII strings, UNICODE strings and HEX codes within files and supports searching within PDF files not need any PDF products installed in your system, it provides unlimited Relative Operator such as AND, OR, XOR, NOT, etc. It will show an Introductory Texts when searching within files, thus, you will know what the file looks like and don't need to open the file. Turbo Searcher also allows user to search in compressed archives,supports ZIP, JAR, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM, 7Z and DEB formats, and open or copy the files in compressed archives directly, never need install any decompression programs.

Download Turbo Searcher 3.50 in Softonic

ZipGenius is a zip tool suite that has all the functions of a typical compression utility plus a ton of extra features. It not only zips and unzips but also offers support for 21 compression and encoding/decoding formats, zip encyrption/decryption, PocketPC support via ActiveSync, drag-and-drop support, integration in Windows shell, sending archive via e-mail, and Web publishing of archives and files via FTP and TWAIN devices support.

It includes the following tools:

• ZipGenius 5
• FTPGenius XP
• ZG Album + Scan & Zip
• Cutter 4.5

Download ZipGenius Suite 6.0.3.1130 in Softonic