WinRAR or WinACE

[Thanatos]

I need a program to open RAR files which should i use WinRAR or WinACE or is thair a better one thats free?

[speedy11309]

i personally use winrar. have no gripes against it.

[chris000001]

i like winrar also

[LiquidPsyrix]

I've been a bigtime WinRAR fan for years.
However, WinACE has some options that allow you to increase compression algorithm buffers that I haven't seen with WinRAR. For example, I recall WinRAR's memory crunching cap at something like 4096K. With WinACE, those numbers go substantially higher.

For everyday compression, WinRAR is still my personal favorite.
For advanced, high-capacity crunching lossless compression, WinACE may be a better alternative. Also, there are underground applications like PKZip and Ultra somethin' that have outrageous compression. Matter-a-fact, over the years I haven't even been able to find a real copy of those insane data compressors.

Overall, both applications seem to do normal duty compression equally well.

-LiquidPsyrix-

[AzN]

Use winrar. Ive been using it for a long time :). Ive never heard of winace before.......

[Rudegar]

i have both installed but only ever use them when total commander for some reason dont want to open a compressed file

[therealwesty]

Also, there are underground applications like PKZip and Ultra somethin' that have outrageous compression. Matter-a-fact, over the years I haven't even been able to find a real copy of those insane data compressors.

PK-Zip could be the original compression utility widely available. We used to use PK-Zip on our old 486 systems with DOS 5.0 and up. You could compress folders to a hard drive, span multiple floppy disks with a compressed folder, make self extracting archives that would execute from DOS or Windows 3.x. When PK-Zip for Windows came out you had all the same capabilities accessable through a nice GUI on the Windows 3.x platform! Our original PK-Zip software was on a single 1.44MB floppy drive.

[LiquidPsyrix]

Actually, thinking back I am pretty sure it was something other than PKZip.. The application I am thinking of was like UltraHRC or... man I can't remember the name!! I'm sure anyone who has been online in the mid/late 90's remembers how games such as GTA1 and Age of Empires 1 was packaged by CLASS and some other groups. They used some sort of insane compression software and that's the program I'm thinking of..

UltraHRC or UltraARC or.. something DOS based that was superb. Took a 700MB game down to <150MB.
GRRR I cant remember it right now. I'll think of it and try to bring it back here.

-LiquidPsyrix-