WinZip is a file archiver and compressor for Microsoft Windows, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly Nico Mak Computing). It natively uses PKWARE's PKZIP format but also has various levels of support for other archive formats. It is a proprietary product traditionally offering a time-limited evaluation version.

WinZip began life around the early 1990s as a shareware GUI front-end for PKZIP. Somewhere around 1996 the creators of WinZip incorporated compression code from the Info-ZIP project, thus eliminating the need for the PKZIP executable to be present.

Since at least version 6.0 registered users could download newer versions of the software and enter their original registration information to obtain a free upgrade. This has ceased with version 10.0; and the last free upgrade, version 9.0, is not available for download from WinZip's web site.

On May 2, 2006, Canadian software maker Corel Corporation, known for its WordPerfect and CorelDRAW product lines, announced its completed acquisition of WinZip Computing.

Features

• Packing and extracting PKZIP format archives.
• Configurable Windows Shell integration.
• WinZip 9.0 introduced 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption,The Advanced Encryption Standard, FIPS PUB 197 () replacing the less secure PKZIP 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions. The implementation, using Brian Gladman's code, was FIPS-197 certified, on March 27, 2003.List of validated AES implementations
  Version 9 also implemented a 64-bit version of the PKZIP file format, eliminating both the maximum limit of 65,535 members for single archive and the 4-gigabyte size limit on either the archive and each member file.
• Version 10.0 supports the bzip2 and the PPMd compression algorithms, allowing smaller archives at the cost of a potential increase in compression and extraction times (especially when using PPM).
• It can work with ARC, ARJ, LHA archives if suitable external programs are installed.

See also

• 7-Zip
• PicoZip
• IZArc
• WinRAR
• List of file archivers
• Comparison of file archivers

External links

• WinZip home page
• MaximumCompression.com, compression software benchmarks and comparisons
• Corel Corporation Acquires WinZip Computing at investor.corel.com

Notes

Windows compression software | Windows-only software

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