ecently my dad contacted me regarding a zip file.  A friend of his emailed him a .zip file, but every time he tried to open the file his trial version of WinZip loaded reporting that the his trial time had expired and he would need to purchase the software if he wanted to open this file.

So, like any good resourceful dad would do… he turned to his technology resourceful son… “What do I do now son?”. 

There are many different compression software utilities out there and my dad not being a technology geek like my self may not know all the options.  There are quite a few…  PK-Zip (the original), WinZip, WinRAR, GZIP and TAR to name a few.  But for this post, we will mention 7-ZIP. 

7-ZIP is a free and open-source program that can do almost everything the other guys can do.  Here are a few features.

This tool works quite well.  It even has a command line interface that comes in handy for use with backup utilities such as Cobian Backup @ http://www.cobian.se/

So if you need a free utility to unzip .zip files that you download or get from a friend, or if you want to compress multiple files into one file, like WinZip, but for free… this could be the tool for you.

Download 7-ZIP here.   http://www.7-zip.org/