With the rise of mega-pixel digital cameras, the resulting images are often way too large to offer to other users on your homepage. As a result, you're best turning to archiving your photos and simply giving users a download link to the archive, rather than the individual photos. The same theory applies to files you'll want to make available. Problem is that many of us turn to the standard .zip compression, but this doesn't always give the best results when trying to compress modern media.

7-Zip 4.62 is the latest version of the popular free archive manager that will enable you to open, create and manage compressed archives. It supports the 7z format, which is becoming the popular alternative to the ancient .zip format. Even Adobe now use the 7z format to provide their trial software to end users.

7-Zip link.

03 Dec 2008