Only a few years ago, WinZip was the primary choice for archive management and, to be fair, is the primary reason why the .zip format became so popular across every operating system. Even Mac OS X has moved to .zip, even though it used the .sit format for years. Now Windows and OS X enable you to quickly open and create basic .zip archives from your files. However, what happens if you want to open an alternative archive format or want to compress your files beyond what the .zip format can offer?

PeaZip 2.4.1 is one of the better free archive managers that enables you to work with the standard .zip format, as well as .7z, tar and many others. It's available for both the Windows and Linux platform and there's a portable version, so you can take your archive manager on the road and use it to open archives on a temporary host PC.

PeaZip 2.4.1 and PeaZip Portable link.

29 Nov 2008