Saturday, August 30, 2003

More freeware archiver utilities

IZArc version 3.2.2
Freeware - Create and Extract Multiple Formats, including ZIP, ACE, RAR, CAB, RPM, 7-ZIP, BZIP2.
The program has a fancy interface (colourful in a good way), but does seem slow.
It has a feature to "Hack" zip passwords - which uses a brute force method, sounds useful, but
takes a really long time, unless you have an idea of what the password could be. The program had some problems when creating BlakHole archives (BH) - some files added did not pass integrity checking.
Performance: Tried deleting files from a 83,655Kb zip file - it took over 21 minutes, and finished as I was
about to give the program a three-fingered salute.

QuickZip
I tested version 2.22, and it is now at version 3.01, oops, no version 3.05.1...
I so much wanted to like this program, which seems to have so much going for it.
Features: Handles many compression formats including ZIP, 7Z, RAR, TAR/TGZ, ACE, ARJ, LHA, BGA, BZ2 and YZ1.
It can include extract, add, sfx, run, install, checkout, do virus scanning, spanning, batch zipping, export the file list to txt, htm and pdf files, plus many other features, including script support.
Like I said, I really wanted to like this program with all of these features, and its Free!
However, when I installed it, it installed a "QuickLaunch Button" without asking.
The User Interface is quite messy.
For the Performance test, I found that you can't select files the way you would in Windows
Explorer - have to individually select each file and then Reverse Selection. This is instead
of using the Shift-Down Arrow key combination to select a lot of files. After figuring this
out, I tried deleting files from a 83,655Kb zip file, and it took just over 4 minutes, not
including the time to select the files and reverse the selection...

No comments: