WinZip

From Free net encyclopedia

{{Infobox_Software2 |name = WinZip |logo = Image:WinZip icon.png |screenshot = Image:Screengrab - WinZip 8.1 SR1.png |caption = WinZip 8.1 SR1 under Windows |developer = WinZip Computing, Inc |operating_system = Windows |genre = File archiver |license = Proprietary |website = www.winzip.com }}

WinZip is a file archiver and compressor for Microsoft Windows, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly Nico Mak Computing). It natively uses PKWARE's PKZIP format but also has various levels of support for other archive formats. It is a proprietary product traditionally offering a time-limited evaluation version.

WinZip began life around the early 1990s as a shareware GUI front-end for PKZIP. Somewhere around 1996 the creators of WinZip incorporated compression code from the Info-ZIP project, thus dispensing with the need for the PKZIP executable to be present.

Since at least version 6.0 registered users could download newer versions of the software and enter their original registration information to obtain a free upgrade. This has ceased with version 10.0, and the last free upgrade, version 9.0, is not available for download from WinZip's web site.

1 Features
2 See also
3 External links
4 Notes

[edit]

Features

Packing and extracting PKZIP format archives.
Configurable Windows Shell integration.
WinZip 9.0 introduced 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption<ref>See FIPS PUB 197, November 26, 2001 (Template:PDFlink)</ref>, replacing the less secure PKZIP 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions. The implementation uses Brian Gladman code and was FIPS-197 certified<ref>List of validated AES implementations</ref> on March 27 2003.
Version 9 also implemented a 64-bit version of the PKZIP file format, eliminating both the maximum limit of 65,535 members for single archive and the 4-gigabyte size limit on either the archive and each member file.
Version 10.0 supports the bzip2 and the PPMd compression algorithms, allowing smaller archives at the cost of a potential increase in compression and extraction times (especially when using PPM). It can work with ARC, ARJ, LHA archives if suitable external programs are installed.