Any PC user use file compression tools everyday to compress files or uncompress files, file compression in pc’s are really famous these days where ever in the world anyone is sharing a file he’ll compress it make it zip (most popular compression format) so you always have to use a software to uncompress theme. there are many compression softwares available in the market which help you compressing files and uncompressing files some are free and some are paid one’s but in my humble opinion ‘7zip‘ is the best from all of them and i think this is the real future of file compression this is what i am going to talk about in this post

7zip is nice and light weight app which is totally free of cost and i think even better than many paid softwares and by size it is under 1 mb. The technology with 7zip compress and uncompress files is the best from all and the compression rate of 7zip is best from all too.

7zip do whatever other compression utility do but 7zip is having very simple interface it uses .7z extension for compressing files and compressing and uncompressing speed is very fast compared to winrar (this is what i was using before 7zip) but winrar is a paid software and there is nothing in winrar that 7zip misses without even a penny, 7zip supports many formats such as RAR, ARJ, Z, gzip, bzip2, LHA, tar, tar.gz, cpio, smzip, JAR, rpm, zip, cab, deb and sometimes i was able to extract MSI files too.

7zip uses LZMA technology which’s compression ratio’s are relatively best of all others i was able to make 7z file of 6gb junk of different files without any issues and i am pretty sure it can handle even more, you can also password protect files with 7z and encryption method is really tough it is 256-bit AES which also encrypt file names which zip format lacks. if the file names are corrupted in some archive like other than windows language then other utilities fail to extract them but 7zip has ability to extract those files too but you have to rename files while extracting you can also make self extracting archives with 7zip and can password protect them as well.

Final thoughts i was using winzip 5 years ago after 2 years i adapted winrar and from 1 year i am on free 7zip and i am pretty sure i am not turning back or looking elsewhere now i am so happy to have this better than paid software for free. the only flaw with 7zip i found so far was there is no GUI version for linux, mac & unix based systems however command line versions are available for free obviously.

Options in right click context menu:

This is how it looks when compressing:

Download 7zip now:

Download .exe

Download .msi