Filzip

Filzip is a FREE file compression utility for Windows. You can use it to compress your book collection in an single package or to extract the archives you download from the web.
Filezip supports opening and extracting archives of the following formats: ZIP, BH, CAB, JAR, LHA,TAR, GZIP, ACE, ARC, ARJ, RAR, ZOO, UUE and XXE.

And it can create ZIP, BH, CAB, JAR, LHA,TAR and GZIP archives. Unfortunately, it doesn't support neither creation nor extraction of 7z archives.

The interface is very intuitive and easy to use. It's translated into English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. You can rename files within ZIP archives and add comments to your files. Adding comments is a useful feature to know what are those big archives with long and mysterious names occupying valuable space in your hard drive. Furthermore, you can perform most common actions from the context menu within Windows Explorer.

This utility supports spanning and SFX archives. Spanning is useful to split big archives into several smaller ones, for example, you can backup an 8 GB DVD using 700 MB discs. When you need your big file back, you just need to extract the compressed file to your hard drive. SFX archives are executable compressed archives, useful if you want to send the pictures of your birthday party to your friends in a single package, but you don't know if they have a file compression utility installed on their computer. SFX archives extract themselves without needing any other program.

With this powerful utility you can also extract several compressed archives at once to their own folder. And it can convert between different file compression formats, for instance, you can convert a RAR archive to ZIP format.

This program is a FREE alternative to WinZIP, WinRAR and PowerArchiver. If you want to try other powerful file compression utilities, you can also try ALZip, 7Zip and QuickZip. However, Filzip will satisfy most of your daily file compression requirements, the only significant handicap is the lack of support for 7zip format. Apart from this, it's a powerful and clean file compression utility.

By the way, there will be a change in the licensing of this program. In the near future there will be a FREE license and a paid one. Both versions of the program will be exactly the same, with the same functions and without nag screens, the difference will be the support priority. Paraphrasing the author, the money is needed to improve the program and make it more competitive. In other words, programmers are humans and also need to eat, breathe, spend the holidays on the beach and all those things we normally need. So, if both versions are the same and you have money to support the development of this utility, go ahead!