WinRAR better (and cheaper) than WinZIP
So over a year ago I asked my Asian colleagues to send me a bundle of files. I expected to get them as a ZIP file. Instead the file I got attached to my email had a .RAR extension. .RAR? What? So I found out that a tool called WinRAR could extract these files. I told them to not do that again and to send ZIP files in the future. All I needed was another program installed in Windows cluttering up my registry! Yet, after spending some time with it and receiving more RAR files occasionally, I noticed that RAR files were noticeably smaller than standard ZIP files.
I wondered if the difference was attributed to the level of CPU time each tool uses. I noticed WinRAR, out of the box, takes longer to create and deflate compressed files. Now I remember way back when creating ZIP files I could specify how much compression I wanted to achieve. On a 200MHz Pentium II that could be a big deal, and it could mean starting to create your ZIP and then go to lunch. So at the time I would stick with the standard ZIP compression. However with the CPUs of today it’s not nearly as big of a deal. Yet as I use WinZIP 10.0 today I don’t see an option to change how deep of a compression to use so I’m stuck with WinZIP’s standard level of compression. Because of this WinRAR will always achieve higher compression than WinZIP, and without all of the annoying startup delays WinZIP’s demo version has today. After a hundred or so uses the WinZIP demo becomes almost unusable anyways. Yet another reason to dump WinZIP…or pay for it to make the annoyances go away.
I’ve done several tests and I don’t remember the results for all of them but here’s one test I did today with a 16.1 MB SQL Server database backup file.
WinRAR - 84% compression - (2.56 MB)
WinZIP - 79% compression - (3.46 MB)
Percentage-wise, the difference may not seem that dramatic, but in terms of bytes it’s almost an entire megabyte! That can make the difference between fitting in someone’s email inbox or not. And when you’re flinging files around the world sometimes to people that don’t have broadband it could mean increased productivity.
So, why aren’t you using WinRAR? Probably because the person you would send the file to would open their email and think “.RAR? What?”
