WinRAR 3.60 final

WinRAR 3.60 final description

Publisher:RARLAB OSSupport:Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP License:Shareware $29.00 Size:1014 KB
WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of the RAR archiver - a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage and control archive files and which supports: complete support of RAR and ZIP 2.0 archives, special algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel executables compression, shell integration including drag-and-drop facility, cascaded context menus and wizard for beginners, command line interface, non RAR archives (7-Zip, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, Z, GZip) management, solid archiving which can raise compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing a large number of small, similar files; multivolume archives, creation of self-extracting archives (also multivolume) using the default or optional SFX modules. You can use a lot of service functions, such as encryption, archive comments, error logging, etc. The program has an inbuilt viewer for viewing the content of text files within archives. You can create compression profiles in order to optimize your activity
WinRAR 3.60 final has a very friendly user interface, so that the menus are customizable and offer access to important archive commands (like extract, test, comment, protect, lock), but also other important tools such as scan, convert or benchmark and hardware test.



Pluses: There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating environments: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, OS/2, MacOS X. You can test, lock and repair/recover physically damaged archives or volumes allowing to reconstruct missing parts of multivolume archives. You can also take advantage of miscellaneous options such as Background archiving, turn PC off when done, compression estimation. Among the new features we may mention: new buttons (options) such as: Define volume sizes..., Rename automatically, Multithreading option added to Benchmark and hardware test command, new command lines, increased compression speed (5 -15%) for some data types.
The speed versus the rate of compression came out as medium compared to WinAce and WinZip: a directory containing multimedia and text files in total size of 104 Mb compressed at a normal rate by WinRar resulted in a 64 Mb in 51 seconds compared to 76,2 Mb in 17 seconds for WinZip and 64,2 Mb in 1 minute and 11 seconds for WinAce.


Drawbacks / flaws:


In conclusion: A good compression over a quite short archiving time sets WinRar in a very good position among the well known archivers. The program is a very good and reliable archiving solution.


version reviewed: