WinRAR - The size solution
*** CONTENTS ***
1. General information
2. Basic and advanced usage
3. Analysis
4. Conclusion
5. Worth installing?
6. Relevant links
* Overview
Since 1993, Eugene Roshal’s RAR program has come a long way to what it is now in the form of WinRAR.
Initial versions ran under the DOS operating system, from the command line, and resembled Norton Commander’s two pane interface (Roshal also released a file manager called FAR with a similar UI). The first release developed for MS Windows was WinRAR 2.0 (Windows 3.1 and Windows 95), while the current version is 3.60. As a side note, since version 3.50, WinRAR runs fully on Windows XP x64, including shell integration.
WinRAR has been constantly modified for the better, with changes to both the compression algorithm and user interface. It also supports compression to ZIP and can open many other formats. It was nominated as “Best Overall Utility” at the 2004 SIA Awards.
* Availability and licensing information
The complete WinRAR experience (graphical user interface and command line utilities) is provided for Windows and U3 systems, with trimmed down command line-only versions available for DOS, OS/2 and UNIX-like platforms such as Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Even if the command line version will surely discourage inexperienced users, rest assured it provides all the important features in the full graphical interface. Anyway, we’re interested in the MS Windows version, which lands on our hard drives as a slim self-extracting 900KB RAR archive (no surprise here).
WinRAR is distributed as a 40-day fully functional no-nags trial. Single-user licenses can be purchased for US$29 each, significant discounts being applied for multi-user license packs (for example, if you buy between 50 and 99 licenses the price drops to US$10, with even more dramatic cost cuts for larger packs).
An interesting addition to the standard licensing model is the availability of the WinRAR Shareware CD, which combines a single-user WinRAR registration key with a host of various shareware applications, for only US$9.99 extra. Not so exciting? Consider the discounts you get for all those sharewares (up to 30%) and you may change your opinion.
* Installation and initial configuration (wizards?)
Installation is actually simpler than your standard setup wizard. Windows XP SP2 users will be warned that the setup file executable is not signed by the publisher and asked if they want to continue. Of course we want to continue, but we wish RARLAB signed their installers in the future; it’s not such a hassle and helps improving users’ confidence.
After being presented with a welcome screen providing some background information on WinRAR, just a click on the “Install” button is needed to trigger the copying of the program files. Finally, a pre-configuration window is displayed, allowing the user to alter some of the most important settings: archive formats to associate with WinRAR, whether or not to integrate WinRAR in the Windows Explorer right click contextual menus (and what options to include), and so on. All these can be changed at any time later, along with other settings.
* Uninstallation info
Uninstallation can be started from the Add/Remove facility in the Windows Control Panel. After a common sense “are you sure”-style dialog box, the process continues in the background until it completes. Some feedback on its progress would have been not only “nice” but also useful.
* Basic Usage
Extract compressed files. Indeed, that’s what we do most of the time with our archiving software. Software kits downloaded from the internet, technical documentation, images or audio files packed into a single-and-easy-to-use archive, they’re all a lot faster and more comfortable to transfer in a compressed format. Speaking of format, there are many more besides the widely known ZIP, RAR and ACE, and WinRAR strives to support those that are somewhat popular: CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZip, UUE, ISO, BZIP2, Z and 7-Zip.
The easiest and fastest way of extracting an archive using WinRAR is by right clicking on the file and choosing “Extract here” or “Extract to ”. If you are a control freak and desperately need to choose another location for the uncompressed contents, try the “Extract files…” option and you’ll feel better instantly.
Another fairly standard operation is creating archives. WinRAR can compress to RAR and ZIP, both in normal and SFX (self-extract) flavors. Additionally, the RAR format supports “solid” mode, which provides better compression ratios but has its pitfalls (slow updates inside the archive, slow extraction from the middle of the archive, impossibility to extract files following a corruption area in the archive, unless a recovery record is present).
To “create” a new archive, select your files/folders in Windows Explorer, right click and choose “Add to .rar”. For control freaks there’s always the “Add to archive…” option, which provides lots of parameters to tweak for their pleasure, such as archive format (RAR/ZIP), SFX (yes/no), Recovery record (Yes/No and percent of total size), Text comment, Compression method (ranging from “store” – fastest, worst compression ratio – to “best” – slowest, but yields the smallest archives). Another interesting option is breaking down the resulting archive in “volumes”, pieces of customizable size, very handy for placing on removable storage devices such as floppy disks or CDROMs.
Archives can also be created from within WinRAR’s explorer-like interface. Just select the files/folders and click the “Add” toolbar button.
To “add” files to an already existing archive, you may drag the new items over the archive’s icon and WinRAR will do the rest. Files/folders can also be removed from an archive – just open it, select the desired file and press “delete” on your keyboard. Note that this operation may take a while, depending on the size of the archive and your computer’s specs.
“Extract/create/add” actions can be also performed via an intuitive wizard that can be accessed by clicking a handy icon in the toolbar.
Another basic, but really helpful feature is “test archive”, which verifies the integrity of the compressed files without actually extracting them, making the process a lot faster.
* Advanced Usage
How advanced does it get with WinRAR? As advanced as you like to… first of all, take SFX archives. This special type of archive has a couple of advantages over traditional RAR/ZIPs, the most important being that it yields an .exe file which can be run like any other application, eliminating the need of a compression utility on the computer that needs to unpack it. This is done by adding a SFX module to the archive - three are available by default, Default.SFX and Zip.SFX which provide a full Windows GUI, and WinCon.SFX, a console-only version. Fear not, all these modules bring a very small overhead, so your archives won’t get much larger if you SFX them. Additionally, the GUI ones offer some special treats (“Advanced SFX options”) such as embedding logos, icons, licensing blurb and other texts, the ability to delete certain files in the destination directory, to create shortcuts and other useful things.
Everybody likes to play some Frisbee with their dog using CDROMs from time to time; however, this may damage the files on the disk. Now, suppose the damaged disk contained some important report archives you had taken home from work, to finish over the week-end. What to do, what to do? Well, as long as the disc is still readable, you can try WinRAR’s “Repair” feature by selecting the archive file in the program’s interface and clicking the corresponding toolbar button. WinRAR will automagically detect the archive type (RAR or ZIP - you still have the option of overriding its decision) and ask you where to put the fixed file. It will next try to repair the archive by searching for the files inside it and fixing them one by one. This operation works a lot better if the archive to be repaired includes a recovery record, a thing that should be kept in mind by people who play a lot of CD-Frisbee.
Security was not forgotten by WinRAR’s developers – users can specify a password for their encrypted archives. Furthermore, much more than just file contents can be encrypted (“file names, sizes, attributes, comments and other blocks”), which makes the archive completely inaccessible to strangers’ eyes, not even the file list can be viewed without the password.
* User Interface
The user interface is surely not the most complex you’ve seen. No floating toolbars, no sliding panels, no tabbed sidebars… just the main menu, a toolbar which grants access to basic program functionality and an explorer-based list view for the files, which lets you navigate through the computer’s drives and folders – simple, yet very effective.
The toolbar is quite customizable: the set of displayed buttons can be modified to suit your taste (no cherry-flavor though) and their size can be large or small. Plus, an optional text for each button can also be at the bottom, if you feel the icons do not provide a good hint about the corresponding functionality.
Since version 3.50 (Beta 1), WinRAR supports “themes”, which basically resume to the set of toolbar and explorer icons used by the program. Several such themes are available, most notable due to its success being WinRAR Jnr. by FOOOD, a renowned graphic designer. A theme contest has been held and FOOOD’s theme got second place, while the winner was RARaddin by Sevdalina Proikova. The full list of downloadable themes is available online on the RARLAB website.
* Help system
Help is everywhere in WinRAR. If there’s a chance you don’t understand some button or checkbox, somewhere nearby there’s a “Help” button as well. The information provided is actually helpful and concise, as it manages to make most advanced functions understandable even to novice users. Unfortunately, it is based on the old WinHelp system which is not quite the latest in technology (not since 1998, at least). The HTML Help (CHM) format allows for much more flexibility in displaying information, supports better integration with software applications and is actually easier to create (write HTML files and compile them into a single compressed CHM file).
* Resource consumption
In terms of system resources, WinRAR will use everything available to suit its CPU and memory needs, in order to make compression/decompression as fast as possible. Of course, it will use more resources if the chosen compression level is higher. That’s alright, though, because WinRAR uses them only when it is doing compression or extraction operations, so, unless you like archiving files all the time, your computer will be just fine.
Compressing (with recovery record) a 440MB folder filled with 126 software installers (mostly already compressed files) took 7 minutes on an AMD Athlon64 3000+ with 512MB of RAM, of which WinRAR used around 36MB. Interestingly enough, 7 minutes were also enough for compressing (again, with recovery record) a folder containing 771 mixed files (documents, images, and so on).
* Ease of use / Value for money
WinRAR is quite easy to use, as most functions are pretty straightforward, available in Windows Explorer’s contextual (right click) menu or from the program’s toolbar. However, it’s not simplistic and power users will find several helpful functions in the menus or configuration dialogs.
Coming in at US$29, WinRAR is affordable, considering it will assist you in all your daily work with archives. Take into account that it “understands” all popular compression formats (note: it can also read ISO images), provides several compression levels, security options as well as recovery features, and you might not find it too steep of a price to pay.
Another feature that cannot be found in most archivers is the preservation of NTFS streams and security information. WinRAR also handles PCM data (WAV files) effectively, providing good very compression ratios (although not as good as the FLAC or WavPack algorithms).
* Best/outstanding feature
The spotlight of WinRAR is its native compression format. Constantly improving in terms of compression ratio (rivaled only by bzip2 and 7-Zip, depending on the type of files), RAR is a very versatile and secure format, supporting many useful features that make it stand out of the crowd.
* Worst issue
WinRAR’s biggest culprit is not really related to the program’s functionality, it’s the outdated help system. CHM does a much better job than WinHelp, not to mention it’s also more fashionable. Maybe we’ll see it in a future release of the program, hopefully before version 4.0. Don’t get me wrong though, the information provided by the existing system is helpful and quite accurate, it’s the presentation layer that could use some polish.
* Final word
Summing it all up, WinRAR is the king of commercial archivers: easy to use, powerful enough to suit almost anybody’s needs, affordable and quite fast when it comes to what it does best: compressing files. Your computer is going to be happier with WinRAR; you love your computer, don’t you?
*** RELEVANT LINKS ***
Official WinRAR Homepage
Download WinRAR