This week I said a sad but necessary goodbye to a faithful Windows utility that I have been using for the last 35 years or more, WinZip.
WinZip was just getting too bloated, too unfocused and too slow for me. And crucially, at times it no longer did the one simple thing I wanted from it: unzip a zip file.
So this week, I uninstalled WinZip and moved to the free, open source PeaZip. And I wish I had done it sooner.
WinZip
I first encounted WinZip in the mid-1990s. It was bundled on a 3.5″ floppy disk sellotaped to a computer magazine cover.
At the time, I was at college, using a refurbished Compaq 386 SX PC running Windows 3.11 and this amazing little application allowed me to squish up my essays and archive them on floppy disks while taking up less space. I was impressed.
In those days, WinZip came as a shareware version that would occasionally nag me to buy a licence, but didn’t really worry if I didn’t.
After I got a job, I bought my first WinZip licence. From version 6.0 to version 9.0, you could simply download the latest version and using your original licence key obtain a free upgrade. Version 10.0 put an end to that. In 2006, Corel bought WinZip and things began to bloat.
Issues
Having used version 22 (from 2017) for the longest time, I finally gave in to its intermittent nagging and upgraded to WinZip 29, earlier this year. But within a few weeks, I regretted it.
I remember fondly when WinZip allowed me to zip and unzip files. It was simple. It was focused. It was fast.
WinZip 29 now comes with functionality to:
- zip files
- unzip (single zip files or multiple)
- encrypt
- manage files
- share files or cloud file links
- secure FTP file transfer
- PDF management
- detect duplicate files
- convert and save images as PDFs
- email large files with WinZip Courier
Really, I only need the first three functions: zip, unzip, encrypt.
And recently, even that seems to have been beyond the capabililties of WinZip 29. More than once, I’ve doubled clicked a zip file… and nothing happened. The computer thought about it for a while, gave a digital shrug and did nothing.
Every few days, I’ve had a pop-up notification informing me that I have duplicate files, would I like to review these? Erm… no! I know that I have duplicate files: I back them up to another three drives. That is my choice.
It feels like buying a washing machine only for it to have deep-seated opinions about where I store things in the fridge and which pans I use on the hob, and occasionally simply refusing to wash my clothes.
PeaZip
So, this week I did something about it: I uninstalled WinZip v29.0 and installed the free, open source PeaZip.
Simplicity
There is an immediate simplicity that I like about PeaZip.
The main interface shows me files in the left-hand navigation pane, including bookedmarked folders, my filesystem and my file history. It is simple, it is elegant and it’s really useful.
The right-hand pane shows me files and the contents of zip files. Files can easily be dragged and dropped to Windows Explorer, or select a zip file and use the Extract here button to immediately drop them into its parent folder.
The toolbar is simple and uncluttered:
- add to the zip file
- convert to another format
- extract files
- test (checksum operations)
- secure delete
- extract here
PeaZip has a whole load of other features, but they are neatly tucked away. This interface focuses on the 20% of functionality that most people need, and hides away the 80%.
I recommend switching on the tab bar (Organize > Tab bar).
Updates
One of the criticisms I’ve read in reviews about PeaZip is that it doesn’t keep itself updated, unlike other zip clients like WinZip or NanaZip.
I installed PeaZip using the UniGetUI package manager. Problem solved: UniGetUI will keep it updated.
Conclusion
Having only used PeaZip for a day or two, I am already impressed. It does what I need from a zip utility:
- unzip files using drag and drop to Windows Explorer
- zip files to .zip format
- er…
- that’s it!
PeaZip is fast and simple. It focuses on one problem and it does it well. No more pop-ups about duplicate files. No more wondering how I get WinZip to open a PDF. No more unused bloat to convert images to PDF (I have Adobe Acrobat for that) or securely transfer files with SFTP (I use WinSCP for that).
And because it has a well thought out interface, I expect that I will probably find myself using the ‘extract here’ functionality more than I ever did in WinZip – after they moved to a ribbon-style toolbar, I found that interface too confusing.
The one thing that I’ve not gotten used to, after 35 years of WinZip is the zip file icons look like this. I may need to change that.
I am looking forward to using PeaZip over the next few months.
Update #1: Change the icon
Thirty minutes, one free zip icon and some gentle Windows Registry Editor wrangling later and I have a nicer zip file icon associated with every archive format that PeaZip supports:
001, 7Z, ACE, ARC, ARJ, BALZ, BCM, BR, BZ, BZ2, CAB, CPIO, DEB, DMG, GZ, HFS, LHA, LPAQ1, LPAQ5, LPAQ8, LZH, PAQ8F, PAQ8JD, PAQ8L, PAQ8O, PEA, PET, PUP, QUAD, RAR, RPM, SLP, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TBZ2, TGZ, TZ, TZST, WRC, XZ, Z, ZIP, ZIPX, ZPAQ, ZST
It involves updating the DefaultIcon value for each <FILE_EXTENSION> in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PeaZip.<FILE_EXTENSION>\DefaultIcon]
Then restarting Windows Explorer in Task Manager, or simply logging out of your account and back in again.
Note that you will need to update these every time PeaZip gets updated. The easiest way to do this is the create a .reg file to run each time to update all the file icons at once.
Using the default Windows Zip icon
If you would prefer to use the default Windows 11 zip icon you need to reference the first icon in the zipfldr.dll dynamic link library path, like this:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PeaZip.7Z\DefaultIcon]
@="%SystemRoot%\\System32\\zipfldr.dll,0"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PeaZip.Z\DefaultIcon]
@="%SystemRoot%\\System32\\zipfldr.dll,0"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PeaZip.ZIP\DefaultIcon]
@="%SystemRoot%\\System32\\zipfldr.dll,0"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PeaZip.ZIPX\DefaultIcon]
@="%SystemRoot%\\System32\\zipfldr.dll,0"
etc.
Update #2: Open as archive
By default, when you double-click a zip archive, it opens in a dialog ready for you to extract to the present location.
I quite like the WinZip and Windows Explorer default, which simply opens the zip file as an archive, so you can see what is inside. You can then drag and drop whichever files you want, wherever you want.
I discovered in PeaZip, this can be set by following these instructions:
- Select Options > Settings.
- Select Archive manager in the left-hand navigation.
- Change Default action on input (open, auto-extract…) to Open as archive.
- Select OK.
Update #3: Moving to Windows 11’s default
The experiment is over.
I lasted around 35 years with WinZip, 8 months with PeaZip, but now I’ve switched to the default Windows 11 zip functionality.
It turns out the built-in archiving functionality is good enough for what I need. Plus it’s faster than either PeaZip or WinZip.
