Considered to be the third most widely used and best reputed file compression software, PeaZip is actually at the very top of the open-source/free file compression software list. This tool can read and extract nearly all existing archive file formats and create new compressed files both in its own format (PEA) and in some of the most common ones, ZIP and 7Z included.
Why PeaZip appears below WinZip and WinRAR on the above-mentioned list is simply beyond me. Those two not only ask for a license fee to unleash their full potential, but they also lack the functionality that PeaZip offers you for free. They are all secure, efficient, and reliable, but, amazingly, some users still prefer to pay for roughly the same functions they could enjoy free of charge. If curious, you can take a look at some of the benchmark tests available, and you’ll find that PeaZip can compress and decompress a ZIP file faster than WinZip itself...
PeaZip has been around since 2006, and it is considered by experts to be the file compression tool with the best file support rate. It is, by far, the program that can read and open more archive formats – over 150, a figure that no paid or free competitor can beat. It can also create ZIP, 7Z, ARC, TAR, and WIM archives (among others), and offers you its own high-quality compression algorithm and format, PEA, with AES256 EAX authenticated encryption. All the most highly rated encryption standards are supported for 7Z, ZIP, ARC, and PEA files, and even for RAR if it happens to be installed on your system. And the great thing is that being an open-source development, PeaZip improves its numbers on every iteration, especially regarding processing speeds and RAM usage.
What I love about PeaZip is that on top of performing as the high-end compression tool that it is, it comes with a plethora of other utilities. And I’m not referring just to PeaUtils, useful as this set of tools is, but to its archive converter, its password manager, its secure random password creator, its archive analyzer, its duplicate file finder, its file splitter and joiner, etc. The list is too long to reproduce here, so – being a free tool – I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.
PeaZip is, undoubtedly, everything you need to open and create archive files with the best compression algorithms and the highest level of security. And if that is not enough to make you download and install it on your desktop, think of the wealth of other utilities and features that come with it at no cost whatsoever.
v6.6 [May 7, 2018]
BACKEND
- Updated to 7z 18.05.
Patches CVE-2018-10115 vulnerability.
Patches bug on some Windows 10 versions working incorrectly with Large memory pages.
Improves performances.
FILE MANAGER
- Added new fast function for hinting possible duplicates.
Possible duplicates shows exactly same size, and same CRC32 calculated on sample(s) of file's data.
For files up to 64 KB data it is sampled a 32 KB region at the beginning of the file.
For files larger than 64 KB a second 32KB region is sampled after the half of the file.
- Added option to reset search history in search menu.
- Various fixes and improvements.
EXTRACTION and ARCHIVING
-New option "Try to edit non explicitly supported file types" in Options > Settings > Archive manager.
Off by default in order to protect from modification files outside known supported extensions.
If on, allows to try to add/update and remove files form files not usually employed as archives, but structurally based on archive types such as Java jar, MS Office and OOo files, etc.
Mall Creeps
