I was a licensee of WinZip back when the only place you could buy it was CompuServe. Yes, I said CompuServe, which if you know what it means, means you think I'm old, and if you don't know what it means, you know I'm old.

But for the last year or so, I've stopped installing WinZip or WinRAR on my machine and instead have been using 7-Zip.

7-Zip has a simple UI, and like WinZip it also has great Windows shell integration.

But it isn't the UI or the shell integration that gets me excited. It is the amazing compression it can achieve, especially with folders containing lots of files. I first really noticed the difference when we were putting together some of the community releases of our P&P deliverables. We'd always use ZIP, but the 7-Zip files where 1/10th the size.

As a test today, I downloaded all the posts from my blog into a folder and then zipped it up using both tools.

That's a pretty amazing difference. No more WinZip for me.

Download and info available from http://www.7-zip.org/