Question regarding Windows XP and its unzipping utility.

[Smellincoffee]

I'm purchasing a new computer- indeed serious about it once I learned Conquests' requirements- and I've been compressing floppy disks to put stuff on them. As the geeks in here know, compressing a floppy gives you 2.56 total, not the meager 1.3 or whatever you usually get. I was downloading Winzip (1.80 megs), but it kept telling me the disk was too small.


Anyway, I was griping about this to a friend with XP, and she said don't bother- XP comes with its own unzipping utility that will handle .zips. My question is- will it also handle .rar?

 

[nihilistic]

Originally posted by Smellincoffee
I've been compressing floppy disks to put stuff on them.

Don't do that, ever. Your floppy will get corrupted before you know it. If you can't fit stuff into a floppy, either get a cdr (if the files are huge), or one of those usb pen-drives.

Originally posted by Smellincoffee
Anyway, I was griping about this to a friend with XP, and she said don't bother- XP comes with its own unzipping utility that will handle .zips. My question is- will it also handle .rar?

winXP does have a native utility to handle .zip files. However, I find it much more of a hassle to have to go through that menu every time I want to unzip something than to just install a new program. and no, it doesn't handle .rar files. For those, you will ahve to download winrar.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Okay, thanks. I on ly need RAR for a few downloads- Civvers like it, for some reason.

 

[Titi]

Anyway, you can easily download free compressing / decompressing utilities that handle .zip, .rar, .cab, etc...

 

[Turner]

I haven't had any problems with compressed files in XPPro. I see them as a file with a zipper in the folder, and it opens them just fine for me.

But I do use UltimateZip. It's a pretty nice free utility that can be found at www.ultimatezip.com. It handles both rar and zip files.

 

[damunzy]

Ultimatezip is a good problem but if you are serious about compression WinRAR seems to be the best, IMO.

 

[Titi]

It's not so obvious to me. I'd say it depends on the file you want to compress (unfortunately, I can't tell you in which case zip reaches a higher compression ration than rar)