Some of you might have noticed the articles that was recently published here are written by hal9000 and I have been quite inactive at the forums. I have been very busy for the whole month fixing up some problems on this website and I couldn’t afford to entrust this task to anyone else because of the risk involved as I don’t want to make any mistakes. The good news is the task has finally completed and I should be back researching and posting new articles starting from early next week. Since I managed to finish the job early, I checked the forum and found an interesting thread posted by william_of_palerne where anyone can get a free registration code for PowerArchiver 2011.
If you have not heard of PowerArchiver, it is an archive utility similar to WinZIP, WinRAR and 7-Zip that allows you to open and extract or create compressed files. It has actually been around for a while and it used to be a freeware but turned into a shareware at a later time. If you have been using 7-Zip, you might want to give PowerArchiver 2011 a try since the stable version of 7-Zip 9.20 was released more than a year ago and has that nasty bug where you cannot view images by double clicking from the program.
What I personally like about PowerArchiver:
1. PowerArchiver is easy to use
You won’t get lost when using PowerArchiver because the graphical user interface is simple and easy to use through its explorer view. By default it uses the classic toolbar and you can easily switch to the modern ribbon menu toolbar from the Toolbar Options located at the View menubar. There is also a preview window located at the right hand side of the program allowing you to easily preview images, text, archives and etc that you select when inside an archive. Similarly to any other archiver software, you can easily compress or extract archives by right clicking on the file where PowerArchiver context menu will appear.
2. Support many archive formats
PowerArchiver 2011 is able to open and extract many archive formats from the normal ones such as ZIP and RAR to the ones that you don’t normally see such as CBR and XZ. You are however limited to creating archives in ZIP, 7z, CAB, LHA, BH and Tar formats.
3. Extraction Speed
Modern computers comes with multi core processors and PowerArchiver is programmed to take advantage of this to speed up to 3x faster than WinZip and 4x faster than WinRar. Their engineers has also done some optimizations on the RAR engine to achieve the fastest unrar extraction. Some day I shall come up with a benchmark between the archivers.
Another feature that I really like about PowerArchiver is that the Self-Extractor supports “Current directory” as default unzip to folder when making an .EXE file out of the ZIP file. This feature allows the files to be extracted to the same location as where the self extractor is located. The last time I tested, WinZip Self-Extractor 4.0 supports only hard coded location or the temporary folder but not the current directory.
There are 3 versions of PowerArchiver which is the Standard, Professional and Toolbox. The Standard version that normally cost $22.95 for a single license is free for 24 hours at BitsDuJour. Simply visit the link at the end of this article, click the huge “Get It For Free” button at the top right, enter your first name, last name and email then followed by clicking on the Complete Checkout button. Within minutes you should receive an email from BitsDuJour containing the free registration code for PowerArchiver 2011. I personally think that the Standard version of PowerArchiver is good enough because it doesn’t come with the unnecessary software such as antivirus, FTP client, virtual drive, CD burner, outlook plugin and etc.
Do give PowerArchiver 2011 a try and if for some reason you are more comfortable in sticking with the previous software that you used to open compressed files, you can always uninstall PowerArchiver 2011 and re-associate the archives formats to your previous archiver program. This promotional free copy of PowerArchiver 2011 does not come with free updates for lifetime.