Just curious about rar

Being an old man, I fondly recall the DOS days of competing compression technologies. pkzip, lzh, arj, etc... (I still have and occasionally use arj for spanning floppies.)

IIRC, winrar is a Windows version of lzh. In any case, it seems to me that zip won the compression wars, and that these days pretty much everyone uses it to the exclusion of all others.

But on this board, I see submissions in the rar format all the time. Why is that? I notice a sizeable UK contingent on the boards; does zip not have the same market penetration in the UK as it does in the 'States? Or maybe it's a school thing, where schools don't use zip for some reason?

Just curious.

Really? I see an overwhelming dominance of .zip attachments.
.zip is also available in Windows by default as a compressed folder utility but not 100% compatible. In Windows Vista this is now compatable and WinZip is no longer needed to be installed to achieve complete compatible zip compression.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RobDog888

Really? I see an overwhelming dominance of .zip attachments.

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Oh I do as well. But I've seen several instances of posters attaching rar files, generally followed immediately by somebody asking them to resubmit it as a zip.

It just struck me as surreal; like walking into Blockbusters and seeing a Betamax section.

I don't believe either format is better. Most extraction tools handle both anyway.

On the net as a whole, I see far more RARs than Zips.

If you use 'solid archive' option, Rar will give you far better compression ratio. (and possibly its security is better than zip.)

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I like rar better because it's faster to pack/unpack with the context menu's
which i recall winzip has too.

but since i use the default xp zipper/unzipper to do the zip's instead of winzip, i prefer winrar for the context menu's.

Doesnt XP have the zip from context menus. Right click on folder/file > send to compressed folder/file. I dont like having to install extra programs and try to keep my system lite and fast. Installing unecessary programs does nothing but slow your system down and bring any new issues from that program into your system. :)

yeah, but xp has this whole decompression wizard, while winrar has something like:
'extract here'
'extract to \somefolder\'
in the context menu

anyway, to my opinion, winrar is quite a light-weight application.

7zip by far is the best no nonsense compression format and is supported on both platforms.It's compression ratio is far better than zip or rar.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheBigB

yeah, but xp has this whole decompression wizard, while winrar has something like:
'extract here'
'extract to \somefolder\'
in the context menu

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Still easier using XP functionality as there is no need to install a 3rd party app