WinRAR 5.40 Review
Software

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. The software is distributed as a shareware and anyone may use it during a test period of 40 days at no charge.The first WinRAR version, with the proprietary RAR format, was released in 1993. The format is a chief rival of the ever-present ZIP format. Though you can only compress files into the two formats, this ZIP software lets you unzip 14 different formats.

WinRAR includes the ability to create self-extracting files, split archives into multiple volumes and repair damaged files. WinRAR also can scan your archives for viruses before you extract the files.
This application's most user-friendly aspects are the drag-and-drop feature and the Archive Wizard. WinRAR automatically detects the type of files you are compressing and adjusts the compression rate accordingly.

WinRAR uses a traditional display involving menu trees that lets you go to your archive folder and drag the files or folder into WinRAR.

Even though WinRAR compresses only two archive types, it can extract a number of different archives. This ZIP software supports the extraction of 14 archive formats. In addition to RAR and ZIP, these include CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z and Z archives. WinRAR scores high in our extraction format category.

WinRAR provides basic help and support options, including a comprehensive in-application manual, online FAQs and a knowledgebase. If you can't find what you're looking for after that, you can contact WinRAR by email. There is no user forum for this file compression software. It has no telephone support or live chat either.

Key Features

• Complete support of .RAR and .ZIP archive files;
• Highly sophisticated, original compression algorithm;
• Special algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics, 32bit & 64bit Intel executables compression;
• Shell interface including drag-and-drop facilities and wizard;
• Command line interface;
• Non RAR archives (CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ZIP, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO) management;
• Solid archiving, which can raise the compression ratio by 10% – 50% over more common methods, particularly when pack a large number of small, similar files;
• Multivolume archives;
• Creation of self-extracting and/or multivolume archives using the default (or optional) built-in modules;
• Recovering physically damaged archives;
• Recovery volumes allow reconstruction of missing/corrupted parts of multivolume archives;
• Support for Unicode file names;
• Plus many other service functions, including encryption, backup, archive comments, error logging, etc.