Review by M Cox

I’ve wanted WinZip software for a couple of decades and now I finally have it. This software has a wide range of applications built into a single user interface - not just file compression anymore. I admit that I don’t have a pressing need to use zipped files except on rare occasions to attach photos and other documents to emails. JPEG files are highly compressed already. The typical reduction for me is about 20% overall. I compressed several text documents and the compression ranged from as much as 90% down to about 24% depending upon the file I chose. Compression is very fast - only a few seconds typically. But I have a very fast CPU running at 4.6 GHz.

Conversion to PDF files takes a little longer, but still very fast. It seemed to take longer than it actually did - still measured in seconds of maybe 10 to 15 seconds depending on the file size and content.

I’ve somehow managed to get by without compression software for thirty years. Hard disks have very high capacity and are relatively cheap these days. But now that SSDs are becoming ubiquitous in laptop computers, the need to compress files has returned - along with the need for encryption of very sensitive data that most people have loaded on their laptop computers, especially worrisome when traveling. And this software application package includes encryption.

The price is somewhat high for pure compression software, but since they bundled numerous extra applications, the value is fairly good. The included conversion to PDF documents is very useful. Cloud storage can be particularly sensitive. I for one have avoided cloud storage - very cautious what people might be able to obtain through hacking. I would definitely want to encrypt most everything I put on public cloud storage.