Although ZIP is now regarded as the standard unified format for archive management, it is inevitable that you’ll receive a file archived in another format that you either can’t open within either Windows or Mac, or isn’t supported by your existing management tool.
There are plenty of alternatives available on the market, many of them free. PeaZip is one of the better and more popular archive management tools. As well as supporting the standard ZIP format, it also enables you to create archives using the newer 7z format, which main advantage is to save additional space. Archives in the 7z format can be up to 30% better compressed than ZIP and also much quicker to open on a slow computer.
PeaZip will also enable you to open an archive in just about every other format, including RAR. It doesn’t support the Mac-only Stuffit (.sit or .sitx) format, however, which is still in use, so you’ll need the free Stuffit expander to manage these archives.
PeaZip is a simple well-designed archive management tool for both Windows and Linux computers. There is a portable version which you can take on the road.
PeaZip 5 is a major new release, with these improvements:
- Major code and design cleanup.
- Most important functions are more easily accessible and most important information is more visible, either when browsing files and in archiving and extraction forms.
- History menu is more powerful and complete, and bookmarks are more prominent, in order to fit at best different user's needs and usage patterns.
- Adding files to archive layout is faster, and operations from Windows context menu are improved.
- Settings are now simpler and completely reorganized.
- System tools are always accessible from browser's context menu.
- 174 file extensions are now supported, PeaZip now handles .crx Google Chrome packages, .maff Mozilla archives, .mdf Alcohol 120 image files, and OPC types .cddx, and .appv Microsoft Application Virtualization files.
