Review by Veil_Lord

You’re probably wondering why you’d possibly even need a compression program nowadays. Didn’t Windows XP and beyond add a compressed folder support for Zip files? Why would I spend money on something I already have? What are you trying to pull? You’re hair looks stupid!nnI’ll get to those questions shortly, except for the hair thing. That’s just hurtful and not even actually a question. Why you gotta be so mean?nnIf you’re like me the only time you’ve seen WinZip in the past is people using the shareware version of it, probably questionably from a legal point of view, to zip and unzip files. So yeah, you’re doing that then you don’t need to go spending a chunk of money on something to do it. Use what’s in Windows. Have a blast. You’ll be happy. Skip the rest of the review. However, if you’re getting files off the web, then you’re likely to hit the need for additional formats. That’s where WinZip truly shines.

According to WinZip, WinZip 18 supports the following types/extensions. I’ve not tried all yet, but have no reason to doubt them. The program performed flawlessly on zip and rar files, except for one set which were corrupted and it offered no option to fix. A past program I had a long time back would offer to try to fix a file and occasionally work. It would have been nice to have it at least make an attempt. I also used it to open a 750 MB .iso image, off a USB drive, in about 3 seconds. That’s obviously not the time to extract the files, but it was able to open up so I could see them all that quickly.

Type———-Extensionnzip———-.zip .zipxntar———-.tarngzip———.gzncompress—–.zncab———-.cabnRAR———-.rarnbz2———-.bz2nlha/lzh——.lzhn7z———–.7znIMG———-.imgnISO———-.isonXZ———–.xznnA lot of these formats give better compression than good old reliable zip. Even WinZip 18 pushes a format zipx which compresses much smaller, but is unfortunately incompatible with Windows or other programs only supporting zip. So you do have to be careful that anything you compress is sent to someone either as a self-extracting archive or that they have a compatible program like WinZip too.

I’ve uploaded a couple of screenshots to the images for this product. One of them shows a very nice feature, the program can be installed as either native 32-bit or 64-bit. Some software skimps and just does everything 32-bit so it works on the older computers, but 64-bit will run better on newer ones, typically Windows 7 and later are 64-bit. I also included the registration page. The program needs online activation, likely for the aforementioned people using it questionably with the shareware versions. However, the activation should be one time. They provide you with an alphanumeric code after that which it indicates will allow you to install it. My guess, this is so they can balance the very risky online activation only where you may be offline, traveling, a company may go out of business, etc. with the ability to know who leaked the first code if the offline key starts getting used all over the web. I still don’t like any online registration being forced, but at least it’s a bit of a compromise.

WinZip makes it appear it can even easily do backup jobs for you, but they’ll force you to upgrade to Pro. For example, they make it look like you can have it backup your documents folder and compress it to another location, but when you actually try to do it, it demands you upgrade. It should be clearly labeled it requires an upgrade without someone having to try to use it and getting slapped down. Hey, here’s another one. Want to watermark a picture? Just turn on watermark, drag the photo in, and you’re good. Want to actually double-click on the picture to view it? Silly, you have to upgrade to Pro to do that. I’ve also yet to get convert to PDF to actually do anything at all except with Word and Excel docs, which frankly feels like a lie based on what the box says; I use LibreOffice and text a lot. Seriously not cool guys. It leaves me wondering what other features might appear to be there, but are not actually useable when I need them.

So how does it fair? Well to me it was overall quite good, except for the in my opinion slightly obnoxious calls to go to Pro and the problems with text files to PDF. The number of formats it supports will meet my needs. It has the other features, but many I truly don’t need that much. Most likely, it will just sit on my PC opening up the odd differently compressed file that a friend sends me and get little use outside of that. So for the price, it’s a bit higher than I’d normally go for. However, if you’ll use all the features, use Dropbox a lot, want to watermark images, easily convert Word docs to PDF, and want it in a convenient place through a single program, then this one should be a good value for you.