ALZip 8.5

ALZip offers you a very simple and easy way to manage archive files, such as ZIP files. While the program can create archives in 8 formats – including ZIP, TAR and JAR – it can open archives in more than 40 popular formats, including RAR, 7Z, ACE, CAB, ISO, and many more. That's why ALZip can perfectly replace any major archive file manager, like WinZIP or WinRAR.

When you install ALZip, it integrates with MS Windows in two ways – by adding its own entries to Windows' contextual menus and by creating file-type associations. This allows you to compress your files – or edit your archive files – really quickly and easily using ALZip. Although this program is easy to use, it offers you several advanced functions, like file encryption and password protection for your archive files, using ZIP 2.0, AES 128-bit, or AES 256-bit algorithms. You can also split your archive files to fit on any kind of portable media, and select the compression level when creating a new archive.

The program's main window is very simple and intuitive. It allows you to create new archive files and open exiting ones with the click of a button. Once you have opened your archive, you can add files to it or extract/delete files from it with ease. If your open archive contains a large number of files, you can filter the file list by name, size, modification date, or format. But if the list is really big, you can also use the "Search" tab to locate specific files containing the keyword(s) you typed.

To conclude, I would say that ALZip is a simple yet powerful tool that offers you all the functionality you can find on any commercial archive file manager. Besides all the supported zip/unzip formats mentioned above, the program introduces its own proprietary format, called EGG. This format offers several advantages over other formats, like full Unicode support and the capacity to compress very large files. Besides, even though the program seems to be shareware at first, the publishers offer you a totally free serial number that you can use to activate the program indefinitely and with all its functionality – in other words, right now this is a free program.

Ricardo Soria

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