7-Zip

My wife asked me today, “where’s safe place to look for software to zip a 26 MB file?”

I think this happens a lot too people that don’t have technical jobs day in and day out.  Where do you go to get software and feel safe that it doesn’t have any malicious or devious intentions when you install it?

Well I don’t have an answer for that.  But if you are look for the best software for packing and unpacking files.  You should be using 7-zip.

It’s open source (read free), it handles multiple formats (zip, tar, rar), it compresses 2-10% better than PKZip and WinZip, it’s easily accessible from the windows shell, etc.

The clean windows shell integration is my favorite feature.  Right click on any file or folder and you have what you need.