Archive (Compression) Programs

A fair while ago I went from being a WinRAR user to a 7zip user, largely due to it being true Freeware rather than just possible to use for free.

Just now I have discovered I have some .ace archive files on my hard drive and 7zip does not support these. It seems WinRAR does.

Obviously I only really want one archive program installed on my computer as it is a little pointless to have multiples for doing this kind of job. Should I switch back to WinRAR or are there other alternatives you would recommend for the WinXP platform?

http://www.7zip.com/type/10/ACE
seems 7zip should support ACE? if you experience indicates otherwise, at least they provide a list of other software that does. i’ve heard good things about IZarc. use 7zip myself and don’t have any ACE files :)

I stumbled onto the same link, but that’s not the official 7-Zip website. Not sure if this site is actually trustworthy either (I’m certainly not going to download the .EXE there to find out), but they even say on this page that ACE is not supported.

This is the official 7-Zip site:
http://7-zip.org

No mention of ACE there. There’s some chatter about it on their support forums, but it’s not yet supported.

wow, did not notice that at all. still, IZarc seems a good choice, and it supports ACE, from their official site: http://www.izarc.org/

Not only is it not the real 7Zip site it does not does 7zip in the list of programs that do support .ace either. Seems to be a comparison site but not something I would overly trust personally…

Will give IZarc a go. Seems to do all I’m likely to want.

Or maybe I wont. What do you know about OpenCandy?

“OpenCandy is a company based in San Diego that produces an advertising software module consisting of a Microsoft Windows library that can be incorporated in a Windows installer.”

Mentioned in the EULA when going to install…

It claims there is “an option to install” and I’m used to seeing the Toolbars and unticking during installation but seems strange to have this message prior to that as I don’t remember usually seeing it.

IZArc ftw as it’s got better right-click/right-click drag support…for me anyways

I used WinAce earlier, i thought it was free software, but looks like you have to pay for it :unsure:

Use 7zip by default but winrar when you need to use .ace.
Solved

Installed IZArc and seems to do the job. Easy to not install the crap it recommends (the evil of Real Player in my case) and lets you select which context menus you want on install, which is something I liked about WinRAR. Only used it for a day so far so can’t make over quantitative comments but so far so good anyway. :)

Keep on meaning to move more over to my Fedora partition anyway but Windows keeps sucking me back…