UPX – the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables

UPX is a free, portable, extendable, high-performance executable packer for several different executable formats. It achieves an excellent compression ratio and offers very fast decompression. Your executables suffer no memory overhead or other drawbacks because of in-place decompression.

What’s New in version 3.03:

• implement cache flushing for PowerPC (esp. model 440)
• fix cache flushing on MIPS (>3 MiB compressed, or with holes)
• fix MIPS big-endian
• bug fixes

ZipGenius – Free Zip Utility

ZipGenius has all the main features of compression programs (zip, unzip, etc.), but it´s different from the others because it offers very special features. ZipGenius can create and handle several archive formats, including ZIP, RAR, CAB, ACE, 7-zip, ARC, SQX; also, it can read and decompress CD/DVD images in ISO9660 format (.ISO, .NRG, .CMI).

Features:

• You can give better protection to your archives using encryption instead of the standard zip password
• You can send e-mail using the built-in mail client
• You can publish archives on the Web with FTPGenius, the built-in FTP client (that can run also as a stand-alone application).
• Extend ZipGenius features with the ZGTools: these are small applets that can run as ZipGenius services or as stand-alone programs. Three ZGTools are shipped in the Suite edition.
• ZipGenius can detect the presence of a PocketPC mobile device: the program can interact with the file synchronization folder for these devices.
• ZipGenius has backup functions.
• ZipGenius supports the command line.
• ZipGenius supports 21 types of compression and file encoding format (zip, czip, cab, rar, arj, jar and so on). NEW: added support to ZIP64 format, which allows to handle zip files larger than 4 GB.
• Now it supports Windows XP visual styles and it has the long awaited zip file fixing feature.

Get ZipGenius here.

7-Zip – Open Source file archiver with a high compression ratio

The main features of 7-Zip

• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for 74 languages

7-Zip works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista. There is a port of the command line version to Linux/Unix.

On 7-Zip’s Source Forge Page you can find a forum, bug reports, and feature request systems.

Compression ratio

We compared 7-Zip with some of the leading archivers.

FILE SETS: Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 for Windows and Google Earth 3.0.0616 for Windows after full installation.

Compression ratio results are very dependent upon the data used for the tests. Usually, 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. And 7-Zip compresses to zip format 2-10% better than most of other zip compatible programs.