A clean and nice interface and pretty icons with the cute figure of an egg with big eyes and feet are the first things you'll see after installation.
This mighty program handles 36 archive and compression formats. It extracts 7z, ace, arc, b64, bh, bin, bhx, bz2, cab, ear, enc, gz, hqx, ice, jar, lcd, lha, lzh, lh7, mim, pak, rar, tar, tgz, uue, war, xxe, zip, zoo and 001 archives and can create bh, cab, gz, jar, lha, lzh, tar, tgz and zip archives.
The program can create self-extracting archives and spanned archives over 2600 volumes. Now it also opens ISO and BIN formats, so you can explore your DVD/CD images before burning. When creating files, you can protect them with a password and, as a plus, it features a utility to recover lost passwords of ZIP files.
It's really fast. When you double click on a ZIP file of 400 MB, it opens in the twinkling of an eye. It would be nice if this program could compress in the open source 7zip format, but maybe it'll come true in the next release.
You can also comment archives and files, create and email archives in 2 clicks, browse files, open and update them. You can also create archives of unlimited size in the ALZ format and open unknown file types specifying what program to use, for example a text editor.
Another powerful feature is the ability to sort files by name, compressed size, original size, compression ratio, file type, spanned volume name, data modified, path, algorithm, password protection, file attributes, CRC, comments and the order the files are stored in the archive. Choosing the sorting mode only takes a single click.
ALZip can automatically open and repair corrupt files silently, letting you work as usual. It provides a command line interface to automate repeated tasks or to call it from other programs. It seamlessly integrates with Windows Explorer, you can right click on any file and get a customizable context menu. You can also use your antivirus to automatically scan your archives.
This full-featured program it's available in more than 20 languages: Albanian, Arabic, Chinese Simplified and Traditional, Czech, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Valencian.
ALZip is shareware for commercial use, but free for personal use at home. It doesn't contain spyware or adware, only a little advertisement in the right corner that seems to be the same all the time, so it seems not to use your bandwith. The trial version can be run with no limitations all the time you want. Of course this promising software deserves a try, even though it's neither freeware nor open source.
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