In fact I have installed 5 extractors (WinZip, WinRAR, 7-zip, Al-Zip, Universal Extractor) at a time. I don't see any conflicts while using multiple extractors on same PC. WinRAR is good one if you are going for paid one or stick to 7-zip.
i use 7-zip. 7-zip can unpack exe and many compressed file formats. i dont know whether RAR or the rest can do this, but i like 7-zip's gui. and its compression rate is quite high
I have winrar 3.91 winzip 14.5 and 7zip . I find that winzip is easier to use than all three esp if creating password protected or sfx files. Win rar is good at extracting diff forms of split fies. 7 zip I feel compresses the files most but is most difficult to use and the slowest.
does anyone know can RAR and Corel WinZip split files like MDF into mdf.001 and mdf.002? 'coz I'm using 7-zip and it can do that, there're guys in other forums asking how to split a MDF file, but most of the replies are about to compress MDF into RAR and then split the RAR. But with 7-zip, I can simply split the MDF. that's why I like 7-zip but yes I think it's quite slow in compressing. However I don agree it is the most difficult to use.
Why not use program such as HJSplit for it.(personally never had to split a file that I did not want compressed also so cannot comment on this function of 7zip)
WinRar is more stable and has never given me a problem. WinZip does not unzip everything and sometimes has issue unzipping something that was zipped using Winrar for some reason? Little flaky
Used winrar for years. Started with 7-zip when reading here about it, at present do not feel I will switch back to winrar.
I only work with cab files if it has something to do with microsoft installers or updates. Then I use winrar to extract and microsoft's makecab or cabarc to create a new archive Just did a quick test with a random 95.6MB folder (which contains other archives, plain text files etc). Winrar compressed to 87.1MB (best compression and solid, without recovery file), winzip compressed to 87.7MB with legacy zip and 88.1MB with new "better zipx". And than 7zip with ultra compression compressed to.... 39.5MB. But I've noticed that with big files like isos there is little difference. But I stick with winrar until 7zip is able to store recovery info like winrar does, this saved a lot of iso's that got corrupted due to bad ram.
Anyone who would take WinZip over 7Zip is really just a fool. Not like it matters, WinZip is part of Windows now anyway. 7-Zip has so many other users other than normal every-day compression and extraction that makes it a must-have tool for any power user.
Winrar 3/93 yes, and the keycode algorithm is weak / a picture to explain img263.imageshack.us/img263/5259/wr393.jpg