TechLifeBlogged

One nice thing about Windows Vista is that it has built in support for unzipping compressed files such as those with the .zip extension. It is nice until you have to unzip a file that contains lots of directories and small files.

Tonight I was updating the Wordpress software that runs this blog. I downloaded the zip file and ran the unzip utility built into Vista. The file is 1.3MB in size. Inside are 516 files in 66 folders, 5.28MB extracted. I kid you not, Vista took around 15 Minutes to extract it! Ridiculous. The built-in zip utility is normally pretty fast but these types compressed directory structures and lots of small files cause it serious heartburn.

I had seen this behavior in the past and was hoping service pack 1 would fix it. No dice.

Thankfully there is an open source solution. 7-Zip is a small utility that installs quickly and becomes part of the Windows shell so you can right click and unzip a file just as easily as you could with the version that ships with Vista. It also compresses files smaller than competing utilities.

From the 7-Zip site:

The main features of 7-Zip

• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for 69 languages

Unzipping the same file using 7-Zip took mere seconds as you would expect.

7-Zip works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista. Do yourself a favor and install this utility now.