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jZip – a free Winzip alternative/7-Zip with a nice GUI

Posted by Dave Mellors | Filed under Software

** WARNING **
I noticed today (7th July 2009) that the jZip installer seems to have changed and it is easy to get extra items such as the Yahoo toolbar installed and your web browser default page changed when you might not want it be. I still consider the application to be good but I do not appreciate the way the installer works so have removed the download link from this post.

Every now and then someone in the company asks to have Winzip installed on their PC and I feel slightly uncomfortable about forking out the money and installing it. OK, it doesn’t cost much for a license but for the majority of the people they only use it a couple of times a year and if everyone in the company wanted it you are still looking at a fair bit of money.

In the past I have offered 7-Zip as an alternative to people but the user interface seems to put them off.

7-Zip is certainly an excellent compression tool but when offered the choice I think most people just want to quickly compress the file and aren’t actuallty worried if program A provides 10% better compression over program B. People feel more comfortable with WinZip and so 7-Zip is often put to one side.

jZip GUI

Today, I installed a program called jZip which they claim is based on 7-Zip technology but it has a nicer GUI. jZip can create and extract from zip, tar, gzip and 7zip file formats and I like the ability to extract from RAR and ISO formats as well (I now don’t need to install an ISO reader). Licensing is really simple – it’s free (they have stated they would like to keep it free) and there is only one version (no jZip Pro, jZip enterprise or jZip Express versions!) so for the majority of people I deal with there is no longer any reason to use WinZip.