The free 7-Zip is a winner!

This is an interesting comparison at Tom's Hardware between the free 7-Zip, WinRAR, WinZip and MagicRAR. Who knew the free one would blow away the paid programs.

Compression Performance Comparison

Thanks, Drac. I'll remember this.

Question: why do you need any zip program when Windows 7 unzips for you?

Obviously, I'm not a zipper upper.

Gil.

As does Windows 8, Gil. However, as far as I know they do not unip other compression formats like RAR. I'm not much of a zipper upper either!

You know, I'll bet Windows would do RAR. Microsoft seems to have decided to include things we want instead of our having to hunt them down and pay for them. An unzipper and a burner for games, for instance.

If it doesn't, though, I have a nifty one (which I already had when I moved to Win 7) that works great. Free RAR Extract Frog , in case anyone needs one.

Gil.

That's what's nice about 7-Zip too - my kind of price - FREE! Not sure about this, but my searching has found that the Windows unzipper does not do RAR.

Ha, but I'll bet that 7-Zip doesn't have a frog to unRAR for you.

Gil.

Ooo... I WANT the frog!

Ok...I don't get it. I have never been able to compress any file "smaller" than the original. Most of the time the compressed file is the same size as the one I was trying to compress. Maybe I don't understand the whole reason. Even zipped files I have unzipped end up the same size as the zipped one. I just tried this 7 Zip and guess what....the compressed file is "bigger" than the original. The original was 1.95GB's and the file that 7 Zip compressed ended up being 1.97GB's as a WinRAR file so whats the use?

Here is what I am trying to accomplish...I am trying to compress the size of the files for the game Amerzone which comes from GOG so I can burn the game to a regular DVD disk and not a DVD-DL. The total of all the game files comes to 4.68GB's and I need to get the size down to below 4.48GB's to fit on one of my regular size printable DVD's. I really thought that by compressing a file it saves on space, at least that is what I have read......color me confused.

GreyFuss,

Some files are already compressed and other files are random enough that they don't get smaller when run through a compression program.
Any compression technique requires "instructions" to be embedded within the compressed file. These "instructions" tell the decompresser how to expand the file. With very random data, the instructions can increase the size of the "compressed" file so it is larger than the original.
Attempts to compress already compressed files will almost always result in larger rather than smaller files.

I don't have the GOG version so don't know what is on it and if it is already compressed. It is also possible that the compression program you are using has not been set for optimum (or any) compression. It is possible to use a compression program to merge many files into a single one without compression.

Hi Robert

Thanks for the explanation. I have no idea as to why the GOG version is so big (4.68gb) when I believe the original game was only about 3gb's. And because it is so big I assumed that the files weren't compressed but I am only making an uneducated guess. I don't know if looking at a picture tells you anything but HERE is a picture of the files that come with the GOG version. Not shown is the size of the GOG setup file and that is 2.88gb's. If these files are already compressed and are unpacked during the installation wouldn't that make this old game huge? Even bigger that some newly released games?