WinRAR is a powerful archive manager (Windows, Linux, Mac). WinRAR is a powerful compression tool with many integrated additional functions to help you organize your compressed
archives. It can backup your data and reduce size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression. By consistently creating smaller archives, WinRAR is often faster than the competition. This will save you disc space, transmission costs AND valuable working time as well. WinRAR is ideal for multimedia files. WinRAR automatically recognizes and selects the best compression method. The special compression algorithm compresses multimedia files, executables and object libraries particularly well. RAR files can usually compress content by 8 percent to 15 percent more than ZIP files can.
Features of WinRAR:
• Using WinRAR puts you ahead of the crowd when it comes to compression by consistently making smaller archives than the competition, saving disk space and transmission costs.
• WinRAR provides complete support for RAR and ZIP archives and is able to unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, 7Z, Z archives.
• WinRAR offers a graphic interactive interface utilizing mouse and menus as well as the command line interface.
• WinRAR is easier to use than many other archivers with the inclusion of a special “Wizard†mode which allows instant access to the basic archiving functions through a simple question and answer procedure. This avoids confusion in the early stages of use.
• WinRAR offers you the benefit of industry strength archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a key of 128 bits.
• WinRAR supports files and archives up to 8,589 billion gigabytes in size. The number of archived files is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.
• WinRAR offers the ability to create selfextracting and multivolume archives.
Recovery record and recovery volumes allow to reconstruct even physically damaged archives.
• WinRAR features are constantly being developed to keep WinRAR ahead of the pack.
Changes in Version 4.20:
1. Changes in RAR compression:
a) RAR general compression algorithm is optimized for better utilization of several processor cores. While some speed gain is possible even in single processor mode, best results are achieved in multi-core environment. Speed gain depends on data type and average file size. Several cores are utilized more efficiently when compressing large files.
b) we had to increase memory requirements to achieve higher compression speed. General RAR compression algorithm allocates about 120 MB comparing to 40 MB in WinRAR 4.11;
c) RAR text compression algorithm cannot utilize several CPU cores efficiently, so its performance in multiprocessor environment is much lower than for general algorithm. Also its decompression speed is much lower than in general algorithm regardless of CPU number. So we decided to disable the text algorithm by default. If you need maximum possible compression ratio for plain text data regardless of speed, you can enable the text compression in “Advanced compression parameter†dialog. Press “Compression…†button on “Advanced†page of archiving dialog to access it. You can also change this option permanently in default compression profile; In the command line mode the text compression can be enabled with -mct switch;
d) “Fastest†(-m1) compression mode also supports several processor cores now. In 4.11 it could use only a single processor core.
2. RAR general decompression algorithm speed is slightly improved, though not to same extent as RAR compression. RAR decompression is not able to use several processor cores, so its performance does not depend on a number of cores.
3. Changes in ZIP compression:
a) now ZIP compression supports several processor cores resulting in noticeably higher performance in multi-core environment. Single CPU ZIP compression is also faster than in 4.11;
b) memory use for ZIP compression is increased to about 15 MB.
4. Recovery volume creating and processing can use several CPU cores resulting in higher speed. Though, typically hard drive seek speed is a limiting factor for recovery volumes, so this gain is most noticeable when working with solid state drive.
5. Now the allowed value for -mt switch is 1 – 32, not 0 – 16 as before.
6. “Find files†command can search data in 7-Zip archives. Previously “Find files†did not support .7z archive format.
7. Windows 2000 is not supported by WinRAR and WinRAR self-extracting modules anymore.
8. “Save current settings†button in “Advanced SFX options†dialog is now available only when converting an existing archive to SFX. Options saved with this button are applied only to convert to SFX operation. If you create or update SFX archive, only SFX options stored in default compression profile are used. Options saved in “Advanced SFX options†dialog are ignored for these operations.
