With most software review sites, you should have heard of Winzip file format. If you enjoy any kind of media that is electric, be it books, music, pictures, movies, or anything else, you need a zip download program or similar kind of utility software.
Zipping is a way to take a big file and make it smaller, using mathematical equations to shrink it down to size. Zip programs can compress your files to 85% smaller or even more to a "Winzip files". This is very useful because a movie can be huge hundreds of megs or even gigs in size. Another kind of newer compressing file format is RAR and it is process by an utility software called WinRar.
Zip download programs do other things as well. They can take a bunch of files and put them in one zip file or "archive" so that it is easy to group files by a common topic. This means that, instead of searching for, say, all pictures of your friends, you could download the zip file "allfriends.zip" and have them all together. This is very useful for archiving types of information where the people downloading it are likely to want everything of one category.
On usenet especially, zip download programs are essential, because many servers will not carry files beyond a certain size. These programs can break the files into many pieces and then post them on usenet. Someone else can come along, download all of the pieces, and put them together using the same zip download program which was used to create them. This is very useful for trading movies or music or pictures over usenet. It is not as important for text, because text is often much smaller than this, but not always.
Be noticed that when transmitting some kind of file for example, files with extension .exe, if you don't zip it to a winzip file prior to transmission with emails, some email servers might even block your email as it is highly concerned that most computer viruses uses this extension as well; since .exe is executive file extension registered in most computer's registry.
Don't make the mistake of paying for a zip download program, when there are so many available for free on the internet. Windows often even comes with one called winzip software, but my favorite is called alzip. It has a variety of different zip download formats which lets you compress or uncompress practically any kind of media file you are likely to come across. It has different settings for different amounts of compression so you can zip things quickly, or take longer, but make them much smaller.
In addition, you can use it to encrypt your zip files so that a special password is needed for anyone to view or open them. I zip files all of the time, because it aids in backing up the hard drive by cutting down the space the backup takes by 50 percent or more. It still takes a lot of room to back it up, so I have recently bought a new hard drive which I use for backing up zipped files and nothing else. This makes me feel much safer about my computer, because I know that nothing can ruin my data.
Back to: 