Which is the best compression utility?

[anoop007]

just did some tests with 16MB of files of all types...

Winzip -- compressed to 12 MB
WinRAR -- compressed to 6.94 MB
WinACE -- compressed to 8.5 MB
ARJ -- compressed to 10.1 MB
MS CAB -- compressed to 13.1 MB

Winzip did the least compression barring Bill's CAB..
But yet its very popular.. any thoughts?

BTW, were this the same results you got?

[HarryW]

Personally I prefer the old DOS PKZip/PKUnzip to Winzip, but that's beside the point.

Rar is better for compresison obviously, I know people who use it but it's not that popular. I don't use it myself. I just use Zip, unless I'm decompressing a file I didn't compress myself.

How long does it take for each to do their compression?

goood question... just estimates.. i forgot the actual ones
WINRAR took around 8 mins on my Pentium 266
Winzip -- 3 mins
WinACE -- 3 mins
ARJ -- 5 mins
CAB -- 10 mins

Myself I only use WinZIP and WinRAR, out of them both I find WinRAR the slowest, I use WinRAR for myself, but if for anyone else i use WinZIP

[alex_read]

I like winzip because :
1) It's quick
2) Nice GUI, can see when it's finished easily / user frindly
3) You can do disk spanning

Well, there you go, that's my 2 cents worth ...