Software Review - WinRAR

What the program does.

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format.
Other file associations are CAB, ARJ, LZH,ACE, 7-ZIP, TAR, GZIP, UUE, JAR, BZ2, z. You can also associate with ISO but since this is an image format there are other programs that are better suited to handle it.



Pros.
Will extract/create multiple segment files. For extraction, the user only needs to open one segment to extract. The program will automatically read it as a multiple segment file and hence read all information contained in each RAR file.
ie. R00, R01, R02, R03
Usually people will split a 700MB AVI file into 50 14MB RAR files in order to make it easier to torrent. You may have seen this many times on ISOHUNT

In XP and earlier, you can right-click a file to extract, extract here, archive it, or add to another archive
You can create self-extracting EXE files.
It is possible to password a compressed file for security but this is not wise if you are a torrenter, people WILL get upset.
Comes with a very easy wizard for creating any size RAR file (Website says will do 8,589 billion GB)

Can also handle ZIX files, but you have to manually select WinRAR to open it because windows will not automatically do this. If you check the box to always open ZIX files with WinRAR it will do it from then on.

Available in many languages.

Cons.
Right click function is not available in Vista X64, but this was fixed in Version 3.70
You can´t email EXE files and most people are wary of them if it isn´t certified.

System requirements.
Very little, program is about a 5MB install. For extracting large files (2GB or greater), system speed will play a role in how fast it will perform this action.

Installation problems/quirks/tricks.
Take note of the default options. This is where Winrar will default extract/compress to. Usually when you open the program it will open the WinRAR install folder. Change this in "Options"
Select Compression tab
Default folder for compression/Default folder for Extraction is here.
You can browse to wherever you want the files to default to. ie C:\Documents\Downloads\
In the Paths tab, you can change the temp folder as well as the startup folder.