One of the best free zip – unzip software program available is the 7-Zip utility software. 7-Zip is free software, you can use it on any computer & you don’t need to register or pay for 7-Zip.

You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don’t need to register or pay for 7-Zip.

Though 7-Zip can unzip most of the compressed file, there are a few file types that 7-Zip cannot work on. Most of it is because many of these compressed files have incorrect headers.

While many of the commercial zip – unzip utility find a way to ignore these incorrect errors, since 7-Zip is based on standard compressing formats, they cannot run in case they encounter bad header files.

There are also some ZIP archives that were encoded with methods unsupported by 7-Zip. Some of these unsupported methods are PPMd (WinZip) & WAVPack (WinZip).

7-Zip works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista. There is a port of the command line version to Linux/Unix. The main features of this free Zip / Unzip Utility Program are:

• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for 74 languages

Usually, 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. And 7-Zip compresses to zip format 2-10% better than most of other zip compatible programs. 7z is the new archive format, providing high compression ratio.

The main features of 7z format:

• Open architecture
• High compression ratio
• Strong AES-256 encryption
• Ability of using any compression, conversion or encryption method
• Supporting files with sizes up to 16000000000 GB
• Unicode file names
• Solid compressing
• Archive headers compressing

7z has open architecture, so it can support any new compression methods. 7z is a part of 7-Zip program distributed under the GNU LGPL.

You can download the free zip – unzip software utility program 7-Zip sources and binaries from Download Page.

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