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Only WinZip 10 or 11, however, can extract files from the resulting archive--which could be confusing, as such archives continue to use the .zip extension for their improved-but-incompatible files. To WinZip's credit, the program warns you about the incompatibility. And the company has posted the technical specifications for these changes so that other compression vendors can eventually make their programs compatible.

Other improvements create no compatibility issues. The best of these include thumbnail views of pictures inside an archive, presented in a window that looks more like Windows Explorer with every update; and the ability to extract from .bz2 and .rar files.

You're still able to create split-volume archives (a ZIP archive split into multiple files of user-definable size).

It feels like WinZip International isn't all that interested in this standard $30 (as of 12/6/06) version of WinZip that I looked at. They'd rather sell you the $50 (as of 12/6/06) WinZip Pro. Even features that were once available to every WinZip user, like command-line support, are now Pro exclusives. WinZip Pro 11 gives you not only thumbnails, but a full image viewer. It also now lets you zip directly to CD, DVD, and FTP, and automate your backups.

--Lincoln Spector

You can find the full review and performance details for this program, and its competitors, at our Top 5 Compression Utilities chart.