Traditionally the first choice when it comes to compressing and uncompressing files, WinZip is one of the most popular downloads of all time. Despite the fact that its competitors have caught up somewhat, it remains a simple way to archive programs and reduce file sizes.

Much of WinZip's success has been down to its simplicity. From the outset, the program prompts you to choose between Classic mode and Wizard mode. The wizard is great for beginners, although even the classic interface is easily negotiated, giving you instant access to a range of features such as compression ratios, password-protection and a Favorites list.

While archiving files in WinZip is quick and easy, you can't help but thinking that the program has lost some ground on its competitors. For instance, the compression rates aren’t as high as they are in WinRAR, and you can only save files in Zip format rather than RAR, ISO or JAR.

Nevertheless, WinZip performs its function well, helping you archive files quickly and effectively.

Download WinZip 17.5 build 10480 in Softonic

In this application also Tools, Tools to open TaskManager, Regedit, etc. which is locked by a virus.

More light, cheap, and has many additional features, This application is only measuring less than 3 MB, and also has 10 professional skins. In addition, this application also uses sound to notify warnings or notices, making it easy to understand.

Users may not rummaged in the Folder Protection, because it will create a folder Protection can not be opened. And should not be breaking into applications with other tools.

Download Folder Protection 2.5.6 in Softonic

To initially install it, the process is a bit tricky but afterwards it makes life much easier. To install ModLoader, go to the Start Menu and select "Run". Type in “%appdata%” and you'll be presented with the .minecraft/bin folder. You must then open the minecraft.jar with WinRAR or 7Zip. Finally, drag and drop all downloaded files into minecraft.jar. The last step is to delete the META-INF folder. If you have any problem, there's a handy How to install ModLoader tutorial video to help you out.

ModLoader makes installing mods into Minecraft much easier.

Download ModLoader for Minecraft 1.4.7 in Softonic

MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and when used in conjunction with an arcade game's data file (ROMs), MAME Plus! will more or less faithfully reproduce that game on a PC. MAME Plus! can emulate thousands of classic arcade video games from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and even some from the current decade.

The ROM images that MAME utilizes are "dumped" from arcade games' original circuit-board ROM chips. MAME becomes the "hardware" for the games, taking the place of their original CPUs and support chips. Therefore, these games are NOT simulations, but the actual, original games that appeared in arcades.

As gaming technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents important "vintage" games from being lost and forgotten. It's incredibly effective once you've loaded a ROM file although for newbies, the process may prove a little but tricky as the interface appears more complicated than it needs to be.

MAME Plus! is an excellent alternative for those that have had problems running their favourite vintage games in the original MAME.

Download MAME Plus! 0.147 in Softonic

- Backup files can be stored in standard Zip (Zip64 for archives greater than 4GB) format. - Strong encryption (AES 128, 192, 256 bit). - Also allows copying folders without compression (synchronization). - Supports inclusion and exclusion of files by wildcard mask as well as by exact file name. - Supports backup of in-use and open files. - Provides detailed logs of all backup operations. - Intuitive user interface for beginners and advanced options for experts. - Has its own scheduler supporting unattended auto-backup and scheduling of any specific time or date, day of the week or month.

- Plug-ins allow creation of archives in ANY other format (WinRar, ARJ, JAR, etc.) - e-mail notification for backup results, incremental backup, multiple backup file versions, an option to run the program as a network service.

Home and office users who needs backup folders and files to hard drive, flash drive or to FTP server.

Download APBackup 3.8 in Softonic

Project Backup Manager is the most smart, simple, light and small software with full features. Which need small amount resource (Processing, Memory and Hard disk).

Project Backup Manager is useful for users who construct projects using: MS Visual Studio, 3DMax, JBuilder, Flash, Photoshop..etc

Download Project Backup Manager 3.01 in Softonic

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

Although many newcomers might be put off by the sheer range of features and settings within WinRAR, 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.

Boasting more compression options, higher compression rates and smaller file sizes than WinZip, WinRAR is now the undisputed market leader in file compression.

Download WinRAR 4.20 (64 bit) in Softonic

What's the story behind Slender?

The myth of Slender started quite simply as a rumor and has also been popularized as an internet meme. The story is that Slender Man is a mythical creature often depicted as a tall, thin figure wearing a black suit and a blank face.

According to legend, Slenderman can stretch or shorten his arms at will and has tentacle-like appendages on his back. Slender Man can cause memory loss, insomnia, paranoia, coughing fits (nicknamed "slendersickness"), photographic and video distortions and can teleport at will.

How to play Slender

The basic premise of the game is the more directly you come in contact with the Slender Man, the faster your sanity drains. You therefore have to careful not to look at the enemy for too long and remember that your flashlight has a limited battery so you must turn it off from time to time to save it. Also, the more you sprint, the lower your maximum stamina becomes, so you must sprint only when you need to.

The controls to the game are simple:

Mouse -- Look around
W,A,S & D -- Move
Left Shift -- Sprint
Left Mouse Click -- Pick up pages
Right Mouse Click -- Flashlight
Q & E -- Zoom in/out

Is it scary?

Slender does well in creating quite a creepy atmosphere for a very basic game. It feels like just you, your torch and the sound of crickets chirping as you fumble your way through the forest looking for manuscripts. However, the overall aim of collecting 8 pages of the manuscript is quite limited and so the gameplay is a bit limited.

Technical issues

Note that you'll need WinZip or WinRAR to unpack this Slender game download.

Since Slender was originally released, there have been several spinoffs with varying degrees of quality. We tested them on the Softonic staff to see which one is the scariest so don't forget to check out how they got on:

Conclusion

Slender is an eerie horror game that's well worth trying whether or not you've ever heard of the Slender Man myth.

Download Slender: The Eight Pages 0.9.7 Beta in Softonic

To decompress a file, you simply drag and drop them into RarZilla Free Unrar, double click on it or right click on "decompress" in the menu context shell. To speed-up the process, RarZilla Free Unrar has the option to define a default output folder or a default password or both. Remember that before you do any of this though, you need to specify an output directory or else you'll end-up searching high and low for your files. Simply go to the folder that contains the RarZilla.exe, use notepad to create a text file named "folder.txt" and put one line in it with the path your desired default output folder (e.g.: F:\Media)

The only annoying thing is that RarZilla Free Unrar's password prompt dialogue keeps popping up and usually you don't want to set a password. However, this can be deactivated by following instructions in the documentation.

RarZilla Free Unrar is a better looking alternative to WinRAR although doesn't offer any major advantages.

Download RarZilla Free Unrar 4.80 in Softonic

Backups are increasingly important in an age of huge hard drives and large amounts of data that if lost, could be disastrous.

The best thing to do is automate backups so that you don't have to worry about them anymore. JaBack allows you to make automated backups of your important data, files and folders and save them immediately in ZIP format. The advantage of this is that you don't need any special software to unzip backups - you can simply use WinZip or WinRAR. Alternatively, the program supports the backing up of files to a remote location via FTP or options to Email it to your mail server. You can schedule backups so you don't need to worry about remembering to backup your more important data.

The danger of this however is that if the backup fails, you may not be made aware of the problem. Fortunately, the program e-mails you if this happens so you don't have to worry about bad or half done backups. You can change the date and time of filenames for archiving plus also copy files and directories using wildcards on schedule. This is useful if you need to specify a specific date for a backup that has to be performed on the same date or day every week or month.

JaBack is a fairly decent backup solution although there's no option to backup anything online and backing up can be a little slow to begin with. However, the fact that backups can be opened with a simple unarchiver make it very attractive for those looking for flexibility.

Scheduled backups and compressed output files that can be opened in any ZIP application make JaBack is a solid backup solution.

Download JaBack 9.15 in Softonic

Be warned: when you use the computer or browse the web, you're leaving behind traces of all you movements that can be easily tracked like breadcrumbs.

Luckily there's a way to avoid these clues: use Wipe and you'll be able to delete all those traces from your system in a very efficient way. What's more, Wipe includes support for the standard DoD 5220.22 algorithm, which renders deleted files unrecoverable.

When launched, Wipe performs a system scan in order to detect all the apps installed on your computer. After that, Wipe displays a list of all the supported programs and the items you can delete from them.

The list includes common software like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, WinRAR, QuickTime and Outlook Express, and deletes usual items like cookies, history of usage, recent document lists and auto-complete entries, among others. Wipe doesn't show the actual elements you're about to erase though, nor does it let you filter them in any way – which would have been useful in the case of cookies, because you may not want to delete all of them.

Wipe can erase the whole list with a simple click on the "Delete" button, but you can also erase only specific items by right-clicking on them. When finished, the program shows the number of deleted files and the amount of recovered space. The whole process hardly takes a couple of minutes and also generates a log in case you want to see extended details about the deletion process.

With Wipe you can rest assured that your deleted files won't be recovered.

Download Wipe 2012.06 in Softonic

This application not only includes support for extracting virtually any kind of file compression format, it also reduces file sizes and runs on almost any version of Windows, from 98 to Windows 7.

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

Although many newcomers might be put off by the sheer range of features and settings within WinRAR, the interface doesn’t take long to get accustomed to. 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.

Boasting more compression options, higher compression rates and smaller file sizes than WinZip, WinRAR is now the undisputed market leader in file compression.

Download WinRAR 4.20 in Softonic

Neither the download managers that come bundled with Firefox or IE are particularly impressive so it's a good idea to add a third party downloader or plugin, like Fresh Download.

Fresh Download claims it can "turbo charge" downloads to make them download in less than half the time they would normally. Fresh Download is a program that works with both FTP and HTTP protocols and gives you a whole range of control over how downloads are completed. Included is a pause and resume feature which is very useful for broken downloads or those downloads that suddenly and annoyingly time out. Fresh Download achieves such high speeds due to its ability to connect to multiple connections and it works across most major browsers. If you don't want to carry out downloads immediately, you can also schedule them on Fresh Download for a later date and it can even download links that you've copied to your clipboard or dragged into the main interface from your desktop. If you're downloading zip files, Fresh Download can also decompress them automatically with it's own Zip extractor although note that it's not particularly powerful or fast - you'd be better using WinZip or WinRAR.

Although you won't notice huge download speeds, you will notice an improvement and besides, this is a much easier way to manage downloads.

Download Fresh Download 8.73 in Softonic

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 has the essential basics like extract, add and test, as well as copy, move and delete functions 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. 7-Zip 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 as 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. Unfortunately, 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.

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.

Infinitely more flexible than its most famous rivals, 7-Zip is a great file compression tool.

Download 7-Zip 9.22 in Softonic