What is the best free archiver to extract archives and compress files?

[harlan4096]

Windows users have quite a few options when it comes to the selection of so-called archivers. There are plenty of free and commercial programs available; while all support core features such as extracting zip archives or creating archives, there are differences in functionality and also speed and size of archives that get created.

Speed, the size of archives, or functionality may not matter much to users who use archivers occasionally only but if you happen to create or extract archives regularly, you may save lots of time if you happen to use an archiver that is slower than others when it performs certain operations.

Since it would take too much time to look at all the different compression formats out there, we decided to focus on the ZIP format as it is by far the most popular format.

The focus is on a number of popular choices; check the archivers section for a list of programs and versions that we used in the test.

Some notes:

* We kept the default settings as these are the settings that most users will use. The only change we made was to switch the format to ZIP if another format is enabled by default. You may get better results if you tweak the settings, e.g. change the word and dictionary size, level of compression, or number of CPU threads.

* We ran the compression tests twice for each program: once using the default settings and once with maximum compression enabled.

* The commercial programs WinRAR and WinZIP were tested as well.

* WinZip is configured to use the maximum compression when the ZIP format is used.

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