7-Zip Better File Archiver Freeware

7-Zip is a full function file archiver freeware!

7-Zip default to compress files in .7z compression format using LZMA compression algorithm.

LZMA, shorts for Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm, is a data compression algorithm developed on 2001. It uses a dictionary compression scheme similar to LZ77 (such as Gnuzip - better known as gzip in Linux world) but features with

• high compression ratio
• variable dictionary size up to 4GB
• compressing speed at about 1MB/s and decompressing speed at about 10-20MB/s on 2GHz CPU
• little memory require for decompressing depends on dictionary size
• small code size for decompressing at about 5KB
• supporting multi-threading and Intel Pentium 4 HT technology

Besides supporting 7z compression format, 7-Zip too able to compress and decompress some other popular compression formats.

• Supported compression file formats:
  7Z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Unzip compressed file formats:
  7Z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB, and NSIS

While the classic Winzip, WinRAR, PowerArchiver, etc discontinue as true freeware, 7-Zip becomes better alternative freeware of file archiver as it is distributed under the GNU LGPL, with exception for the RAR plugin.

Others attractive features of 7-Zip such as:

• Supports files size up to 16000000000GB
• Unicode file name
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Ability of using any compression, conversion or encryption method
• Multilingual interface up to 63 languages at time of writing.
• Available in various platforms such as both Windows 32-bit and 64-bit version, Unix, FreeBSD, Redhat, Fedore Core, Debian, Gentoo, Mac OS X, BeOS etc