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7-Max by the author of 7-Zip works well for memory heavy programs assuming your drivers all support it. It works by using 4mb instead of 4kb pages for memory management.

7-zip also uses AES with a 256 bit cipher key for it's password protected file option. I store my personal backups in the 7z format, as I've always had a bad feeling about WinZip's zip cipher scheme, so I wonder what issues the 7z's encryption implementation might have.

Install

OpenOffice.Org

Mozilla

VideoLAN

7-Zip

WinGimp

Open AntiVirus

Then see if the users can use them and get used to them. Then maybe when you do switch to Linux, they will be using the same apps, but under Linux. With maybe the exception of 7-Zip, no Linux port yet?

• Abiword - Word processor, supports .doc, .rtf, GPL.
• Open Office - Whole Office suite, including a database frontend and BASIC macro language.
• Perl - Scripting language
• Python - Scripting language
• Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
• MinGW - Port of some of the UNIX utilities (BASH, gcc, vi...) to Windows.
• djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
• Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird - Web browser, e-mail client, IRC client, lots more.
• Filezilla - FTP client.
• xchat - IRC client.
• putty, pscp, psftp and others - Telnet/SSH clients.
• Gaim - Client for IRC/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ/AIM and more.
• gzip - Compression (usually better than .zip).
• tar - Extracts/Makes tar archives.
• bzip2 - Totally ace compression (usually better than gzip).
• Info-ZIP - Support for .zip. Good free substitute for Winzip.
• 7-zip - Support for multiple compression formats.
• frhed - Hex editor
• Ext2fs - Several programs for doing Ext2 under Windows.
• Antiword - Converts documents out of the proprietary .doc format.
• MySQL - RDBMS.
• Apache - Web/Proxy server
• sendmail - Mail server
• squid - Proxy server
• freeamp - Audio player
• winlame - MP3 encoder
• cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
• gimp - Very detailed graphics program.
• imagemagick - Graphic manipulation. Provides the 'convert' utility under UNIX.
• freeciv - Civilisation clone.
• gnuplot - Plotting package.
• TightVNC - A fork of VNC, with enhancements.
• RealVNC - The original VNC.
• rdesktop - Access Windows Terminal Services and Remote Desktops.
• Nmap - Well known port scanner.
• John the Ripper - Password cracker. Does NT and MD5.

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

benchmarks

but usually these compare different formats rather than how well each compresses zip files.

Igor Pavlov likes to claim that 7-zip creates smaller zips than anything else, but I haven't seen any third party comparisons even interested in that.

I use 7-zip instead of Winzip. It compresses into more formats and doesn't ask you to buy it every time you use it. It's free (as in beer) and small enough to fit on a floppy.

I use SciTE (Scintilla Text Editor) for CSS (as well as HTML, SVG, etc). Not only does it color-code your syntax, but it knows valid HTML and CSS and will alert you when you use a nonstandard element or attribute. It's really handy. I wish it knew SVG as well. It knows a bunch of other languages, but I'm not a programmer so I never use it for more than web development. It is available for Win32 and Linux (but not as a native cocoa app in OS X, unfortunately) and is distributed under a license similar to the Python license.

Someone already mentioned Filezilla, so I won't bother. Except to say that it rocks.

I learned about all of these applications from the GNUWin CD. I usually look there first when I'm looking for Free software to do something on Windows. Have a look around their software lists and you'll probably find a few interesting things to try.

1) 7-zip. Like WinZip but Open source!

2) Mozilla. 'nuff said

3) SciTe. Excellent text editor. Open Source

4) AutoIt. Scripting/automation language for Windows, also open source.

5) FinePrint. Best shareware Ever. N-up printing, universal print preview, extract to image, text, metafile

6) rjhExtensions Add "Copy Path to Clipboard" and "Command Prompt" to right-click menu.

7) IrfanView good freeware image viewer

8) Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.1--because I hate 6.0 and GSView is not quite good enough yet :(

9) Microsoft Office.... yeah I know, I know

10) TweakUI

thanks for the link, idiot boy

if you're going to plug something, link to it

Lilypond: A great open source music notation program.

Cinepaint: Painting and retouching.

CDex: CD Ripper and converter.

Panda 3d: 3D rendering engine.

Mambo: Content management

Gordian Knot:DivX/XviD encoding

Helix: Media player

7 Zip: Zip

If you haven't tried out Open Source software yet (shame on you, why are you reading slashdot then) then its time to try some.

Start off by trying an open source web browser, such as firefox. I have personally installed it on several machines, and it works wonders.

Then try some more software, Such as Gimp, OpenOffice, 7Zip.

If you liked that software, then you may Like to try e Linux, the Open Source Operating System! It even works on Macs too! See how easy to use and reliable open source is. Try Mandrake or Fedora as they are both good versions of Linux.

ZIP is old school, and you can do much better these days. ZIP is still pretty good in the speed department, but you can get better compression ratios these days. LOTS better. For instance, check out 7-Zip. It's free software, it works, and its compression format has nearly twice the compression ratio of ZIP. And, by the way, it can create ZIP files in the ZIP format that have better compression than other ZIP programs get. And 7-Zip isn't even the best compression out there.

XP's zipping isn't good. Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no fancy crap, and works great for all kinds of archives. You'll thank me later.

Is 7-Zip.

I agree with you entirely. Recently, however, I've been using 7-zip which is an excellent open-source alternative.

I suspect open-source is the real competitor / threat to shareware (and all commercial software for that matter) and not piracy, since open-source provides huge advantages to the user. It's interesting to note that the 7-zip people are offering various tiers of technical support to make money.

Waning are the Microsoftian days where a fixed-time programming effort can reap fairly unbound profit (cf. Bill Gates). With the ubiquity of general software and programmers (and perhaps the public's emerging realization of zero cost duplication and the intent and nature of copyrights), programming is becoming more of a service.

This is probably best for humanity in the long run, though an obvious hinderence to (particularly lone) programmers in their attempts to become independently wealthy by starting their own software companies based upon their own ideas.

Check out 7-zip http://www.7-zip.org/. It supports rars, zips etc but I use its own 7zip format most of the time which USUALLY is much smaller than a rar even.

Yeah, if it wasn't for the ability to have tar run the archive through b/gzip for me with the -g or -j flag, I would probably just use plain tar files. However, it is convenient enough to just stick the j in, so I bzip all my archives.

That said, when I used to use Windows, if I needed an encrypted ZIP file, I zipped it up with 7-zip, and ran the resulting zip archive through PGP to encrypt it. Archiving and encryption are separate. However, a flag for tar to run the final archive (after bzipping) through GPG would be nice. Otherwise, I would have to be un-lazy and type out a longer command, or be really un-lazy and make a wrapper script. And I am too lazy for that.

I use 7 Zip

Very easy and straight forward for me.

7zip is pretty cool - much better compression than ordinary zip. So I wonder if 7zip will support PKZip/WinZip encryption... From the looks of their fileformat page, they support AES encryption...
Oh yeah and 7zip is under the LGPL license :)

7zip is pretty cool - much better compression than ordinary zip. So I wonder if 7zip will support PKZip/WinZip encryption... From the looks of their fileformat page, they support AES encryption...
Oh yeah and 7zip is under the LGPL license :)

"I'm buying a new mid-grade laptop computer, which I plan to dual-boot between Windows XP Home and Mandrake 9.x. Before its arrival in a few weeks I'm trying to think of what 'essential' software I'll need to make a usable home system. In general I'd like to spend as little money as possible (free is good). As far as my needs, think 'typical family PC' without an emphasis on gaming. I know I can get something like Open Office for word processing, presentation, etc. needs, but is there such a good thing as a good free virus checker? A good free email client? A handy web browser? What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both the Windows and Linux side of things?""

These are the files I keep on my "Esential CDs" that I bring around to help out other non-techs (Windows users) people. (Of course because they are financially broke after paying $200 for their Operating System, they want everything else to be free.) ;-)

Anti-Virus: The best free antivirus program I have found AVG Anti-Virus 6.0

Office Suite: (Word Processing, SpreadsThe quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped off the edge. The quick brown fox ran off with all his toysheet, Slideshows, etc.)
Open Office 1.1

CD/DVD data/audio Burner: (and doubles as a CD image creator .ISO and .CUE)
BurnAtOnce 0.99a

CD/DVD image loader/emulator (perfect for people who often misplace their CDs): (loads .ISO, .CUE, .CCD, .CDI etc. files without burning them)
DAEMON Tools 3.41

MultiMedia Player (Mpeg, Mp3, AVI, etc.)Winamp Classic 2.91

or for audio only Foobar 2000 0.7

Zip Extractor:Ultimate Zip or7 Zip 3.11

Download Accelerator:Star Downloader v1.42

Internet Browser: (other than IE) Mozilla 1.4 or Opera 6.20

System Statistics: (Motherboard, Memory, BIOS, Video, Software info, etc)AIDA32 3.80

E-mail (other than Outlook Express)Thunderbird 0.2 or Pegasus Mail 4.12

Spyware/Adware killer:Ad-aware 6 or Spybot Search & Destroy 1.2

Pop-up Killer/Browser Enhancer (for IE)Google Toolbar 2.0.102

PDF document reader:Adobe Acrobat 6.0

FTP program (other than IE and the command line FTP)Winsock FTP LE 5.08 or FileZilla 2.2.1

Internet Chat Programs (other than Windows Messenger)Gaim 0.70or Trillian Basic 0.74E

Firewall Software:ZoneAlarm 3.7.211

or if you have Highspeed Internet, a spare 200mhz PC, and two network cards laying around...ClarkConnect 2.0

CD Ripper / MP3 Creator CDex 1.51

Graphics Editor (other than Paint) The Gimp

Graphics viewer (other

• The Bat! mail client (shareware)
• Opera browser/mail/newsclient (adware), much more lightweight than Mozilla
• 40tude Dialog newsclient
• Total Commander file manager (shareware)
• eMule peer-to-peer client (open source)
• ViM
• editor (open source)
• GhostScript and GSView for PostScript and PDF rendering/conversion/manipulation (open source)
• ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl for scripting
• 7-zip packer

Despite Microsoft's press releases to the contrary, Windows machines are not secure and need decent firewall and antivirus software. I see others have already mentioned the Kerio firewall, so I'll just add that it can be easily extended with Sponge's excellent, freely available filters. (I'm using set 2, but there are versions that are both more or less rigorous). I've also AVG Antivirus installed it seems to work well enough.

Some other useful free utilities:

Tclockex
A small utility that greatly increases the usefullness of the system tray clock. You can have the date as well as the time, as well as a resource monitor that lets you know at a glance how the system is doing.

AboutTime"
A little applet that sets the system clock from a list of time servers. Works well and unobtrusively.

7-zip
An easy to use explorer plug-in that understands most kinds of compressed files.

CDex
A great tool for ripping / converting CDs and mp3s.

X-teq>
A very powerful utility that lets you change pretty much everything that's changeable in Windows. Allows you to set Windows update registration done, which would only be useful to pirates and won't be mentioned here.

The Proxomitron
A web proxy that strips out ads, pop-ups and other garbage.

I'm more familiar with Redhat, but I have no doubt Mandrake will come out of the box with programs that are functionally equivalent to the ones listed here.

Firewall - Kerio Personal Firewall - bloat-free firewall, very small memory footprint, extremely powerful, and it's free.

Compression - 7zip - compression utility that handles virtually every format, integrated into UI, and it's free.

Imaging - Irfanview - image viewer handles virtually all image formats, plays Flash and video, plus can thumbnail, batch-convert, retouch, and it's free.

Music - Winamp - Plays virtually all music formats (including WMA without the DRM annoyances), plus 2.91 now plays video and streaming video, and it's free.

The key here is these programs are capable replacements for a lot of more expensive pay programs. For example, Norton Firewall, Winzip, ACDsee together come to about $200 retail.

Is the "generally less than 128MB" before or after compression? A nice compression package like 7-zip might get the files down to a size that can be emailed off-site each night.

In my experience, Wine is a great way to use Windows-only tools under Linux (e.g. the 7-zip tools ) when you need to. However, using it consistently is a lot of work. From the Wine FAQ, "Wine is chasing a moving target since every new release of Windows contains new API calls or variations to the existing ones." Ergo, Wine will never be "finished" or "complete". Our favorite Wine still needs to age a bit before it is ready to be served. Even so, it is wonderfully valuable when needed.

How does it comepare to RAR thou?

Check out the comparison table at 7-zip's homepage.

It claims about 9% better than WinRAR. I haven't personally verified that claim (mostly because I never RAR anything, I either zip them or 7z them), but... Since it costs nothing, download a copy (From the link I gave above) and see for yourself.

At worst, you'll delete it tomorrow. At best, you'll find a great new (free!) program to handle all your de/compression needs (And no, I have nothing to do with its development, so this doesn't count as a shameless plug).

Can you explain why it's been 2.30 beta since 2001-10-01 17:00 ? look at Sourceforge Download list ("Below is a list of all files of the project") .

2.30 Beta 5 on 2001-10-01 17:00 and 2.30 Beta 32 on 2003-05-14 17:00 !

Couldn't have they released a 2.2x stable in 19 months ?

Their "last stable" seems to be 2.24 (released on 2001-03-21, at the bottom of the page), Previous version of 7-Zip (it doesn't support 7z format).

7-zip, I've been using this for quite a while. It works just as well as "Winzip" but is free and supports more formats. The wonder of Open Source Software!!!

Everybody, start using the (open source) 7-zip instead.

Yes, 7-zip's are nice though not very well adopted (at least as of yet). I have yet to see something distributed in the 7z format. The program does however do an impressive job even compressing in the normal zip format. http://www.7-zip.org/

So why use either of them? That copy you downloaded and spread all over your organisation is illegal. Go on, read the licences, I dare you to ;-) Then uninstall both of them and install either 7-zip or IZArc instead. You know you should!

The main features of 7-Zip:

• Free software distributed under the GNU LGPL.
• Highest compression ratio in new 7z format format.
• Supported formats: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB.
• For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that
  is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip.
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format.
• Integration with Windows Shell.
• Powerful File Manager.
• Plugin for FAR Manager.
• Powerful command line version.
• Localizations for 38 languages.

wow, i always assumed 7-zip had a command-line interface for linux and cygwin.
it does not.
in fact, it only has a distribution for windows.
website claims it works with wine, though.

if i still used win2k, i'd be on this in seconds;
the interface looks very usable, better than winzip or power archiver (imho).

the parent post forgot to mention:
the .7z format has the highest general compression algorithm out there.

wow, i always assumed 7-zip had a command-line interface for linux and cygwin.
it does not.
in fact, it only has a distribution for windows.
website claims it works with wine, though.

if i still used win2k, i'd be on this in seconds;
the interface looks very usable, better than winzip or power archiver (imho).

the parent post forgot to mention:
the .7z format has the highest general compression algorithm out there.

http://www.7-zip.org/

It works with:
zip
tar
bz2
cap
cpio
gz
rar
rpm

Windows users rejoice! Use 7-zip (click here) and end the WinZip-PKWare monopoly ;).

Mod away, but remember.. it's open source MWUAHAHA!

Perhaps if you find Winzip annoying, you might like to try a nice OSS alternative zip program without annoying nag screens?

I like 7-zip, it's free, has a context menu, supports tar.gz (which the native WinXP unzipper doesn't do) and it's light-weight.

7 Zip is good but you might also check out JZip. JZip looks more like Winzip which is what most users are used to.
Or try FreeExtractor which creates self extracting exe's. I have a whole collection of Open Source Software for Windows.

The 7z format used by 7-Zip is an open architecture. There are several available compression methods and bzip2 is one of them.

7-zip is open source, free and usually compress at least as good as WinRAR.

Most Free Windows archiving programs only support Zip... While that's the major format, I often run into non-zip archives.

So, head over to http://www.7-zip.org.
Not only does it support most major formats, but it's completely LGPLed.

Additionally, the compression you get with the native 7z format has always been better than bzip2, and better than twice as good in some cases. It comes with a tiny self-extractor in case you want to share files with someone who doesn't have 7-zip yet.

For zip files i have been using a great GPL program called 7-zip. It integrates into the Explorer Shell and also handles tar.gz as well. It's a pretty cool little program.