PowerArchiver 2006
Sneaking a Peak at the New King of Compression, Compression Competition for WinZip and PKZIP
Compression software is a true remnant of old-school MS-DOS. Despite our modern age of 100-plus gigabyte hard drives and speedy internet connections, file compression utilities still maintain a useful place. And among such utilities, PowerArchiver is an excellent one. This utility program offers a wealth of features for power users while remaining easy enough for novices to quickly master. Either way, everyone wins with more storage real estate and faster e-mail transmission times.
Like other compression utilities, ConXware's PowerArchiver lets you save files in compressed formats so they're smaller, take up less space on a hard drive, and are faster to send as e-mail attachments. It's the equivalent of sitting on a suitcase to cram all of those souvenirs that you purchased on vacation.
With all that PowerArchiver does, its developers must have had to use a compression utility themselves to squeeze in its many features. The program offers lots of options and supports a dizzying array of compression standards. And despite this, PowerArchiver is easy to learn and use.
According to its publisher, PowerArchiver version 9.26 is the final release of PowerArchiver 2004, with PowerArchiver 2006 next in line (and now in beta release as v9.50). The v9.26 release offers minor tweaks and bug fixes and resolves a potential security issue. Over the past year, the 2004 version improved its ability to handle corrupted ZIP files, sped up the compression of files, integrated support of a Microsoft Outlook plug-in, and reduced its installed size. It's the culmination of a version that was originally released in July 2004.
And ConXware is looking to take the compression utility to an entirely new level with a bevy of new and improved features set to make their debut in PowerArchiver 2006, including improved security, support for 7-Zip PPMd compression, SFTP (SSH FTP) support for secure FTP transfers, shell extension support for 64-bit Windows, full skinning support, and a new alert window in system tray.
Sitting on the Suitcase
On paper, the program sounds like a sterile utility that's solely for power users. While these users will appreciate the program's flexibility and comprehensive feature set, it's clearly not beyond the grasp of novices.
Those who are new to compression will appreciate the intuitive wizard that walks you through the process of adding files and folders, filtering them based on your preferences, adding password protection, and applying one of five different compressions formats. In addition, there's an impressive option that allows you to send an archived file to an FTP server.
Experienced practitioners, on the other hand, will be able to dive right in and immediately use the program, likely taking advantage of PowerArchiver's convenient integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer. For this, the program lets you compress, extract, and encrypt files with a single click from within Explorer all without having to open PowerArchiver. The program also offers an option to use an Explorer-like interface to browse a hard drive for archives.
PowerArchiver stores frequently-used compression settings so you can simply select a profile to save time. There's also a convenient viewer that supports a variety of graphic formats, including Photoshop, Autodesk, Paintbrush, Photo-CD, PaintShop Pro, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF and more, as well as basic text files.
Everyone can have fun with the "skinnable" toolbar that displays fun icons of a user's choosing. This toolbar may be docked to the side of an application or allowed to float on the screen so it's easily accessed.
Compression: The Nuts and Bolts
PowerArchiver offers support for almost any compression standard you can think of. This includes: ZIP, CAB, LHA (LZH), TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, BH, XXE, UUE, yENC, and MIME. There's also read-only support for: RAR, ARJ, ARC, ACE, and ZOO (the program can only read files compressed in these formats).
PowerArchiver also offers support for the Deflate64 method and 7-Zip, a new format that is based on an open-source architecture. Beyond the standards, PowerArchiver can create compressed ZIP files of unlimited size and from an unlimited number of files, and can span files across multiple discs, with no limit in span sizes.
For security, PowerArchiver supports the new ZIP AES standard and proprietary PAE standard with five encryption methods that include Blowfish (128-bit), DES (64-bit), Triple DES (128-bit), AES 128-bit, and AES 256-bit. If you like, the program's password manager will save your frequently used passwords so you don't have to recall them.
As the name implies, the convert tool adequately translates compressed files between supported formats and converts multiple files and folders at the same time. If a compressed ZIP file has been corrupted, a repair tool does its best to fix it. It's the tool of last resort when problems occur and before you resort to back-ups (you did back it up, right?).
Write/merge multivolume tools allow you to split ZIP files into different volumes, as well as merge several into a single file. There's a batch tool that can be configured and used to compress files into separate archives in a single process. And a multi-extract tool allows you to extract multiple archives at once.
While PowerArchiver effectively bridges the barrier between different compression standards, it also bridges the language barrier. The program comes in versions for 11 different languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Russian, and more.
Beyond Compression
WinZip and PKZIP dominate the compression world and both cost ten dollars more than PowerArchiver. But PowerArchiver is more than up to the job of replacing and exceeding the capabilities of WinZip and PKZIP, so it's definitely worth a look. You can try all three for free to see which one best meets your needs.
If you're a current user of PowerArchiver, version 9.26 or the upcoming PowerArchiver 2006 is probably worth the upgrade to integrate the latest compression and security-related improvements. For advanced users, PowerArchiver comes in a command-line version that supports most popular compressed file formats. And there's an Outlook Plug-In version that allows you to access PowerArchiver's features from within Microsoft Outlook (versions 2000, XP and 2003).
PowerArchiver costs $19.95 for a single license and ConeXware offers a business license arrangement that allows you purchase multiple seats. And with PowerArchiver 2006 on the way, expect to hear more from PowerArchiver in the near future.
Pros: Excellent features for power users; attractive, easy-to-use interface for novices; less expensive than primary competition (WinZip and PKZIP); 7-ZIP compression/decompression support; full skinning support
Cons: Not as well known as WinZip and PKZIP faces an uphill climb for market share.
