There are a number of different archive formats, with ZIP the most common across the two major operating systems. Factor in RAR, TAR and the different ZIP formats and it's rather difficult to find an archive manager that will handle all formats. The commercial applications are also somewhat feature-laden, offering many different functions that are often irrelevant for most users. You might just want to open an archive as quickly as possible.

Universal Extractor 1.5 is a tool that will enable you to open just about every archive. Better still, it's available from your right-mouse button menu, so you can quickly unextract files from an archive. Universal Extractor will even go further and will handle msi based wrapped up installation files, if you need to access the contents.

28 Nov 2007