- Quick specs
- Price: Free to try (40-day trial, some features disabled); $29.00 to buy (Buy it now)
- Operating system: Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98
- Date added: September 24, 2007
- Total Downloads: 77,689,980
- Downloads last week: 310,115
- See full specifications
A newer version of WinRAR is available.
(Download doesn't provide access to previous versions of this program.)
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 1372 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: CNET Staff
There are plenty of solid compression utilities to choose from, but this shareware powerhouse offers the features and ease of use that might place it at the top of its category. WinRAR is easy to use, lightweight, and flexible.
An intuitive interface lets you mouse over icons to see their functions and if you don't like their candy-coated appearance, you can always choose from several themes at the developer's site. The Folder Tree Panel makes sifting through your directories to find files easier than ever. But once you see the size savings of a RAR archive, with a compression ratio of 8 percent to 15 percent better than the ZIP format, you'll understand why so many users and developers are making the switch from other apps. With virus scans now integrated and minor interface tweaks for Vista, only the slightly slower decompression speed holds the app back.
Beyond its good looks and right-click readiness for basic compression and unzipping, WinRAR offers unpacking support for a large number of archive formats, including ACE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, and ZIP. WinRAR's advanced features are icing on the cake, with Unicode support for international formatting, embedded file comments, damaged archive repair, archive locking, self-extracting archives, and easy encryption. Anyone seeking an all-in-one archiving solution would be remiss to not check out WinRAR.
Watch the CNET video review of WinRAR:
Publisher's description
From RARLAB :WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, an archiver and archive manager. RAR files can usually compress content by 8 percent to 15 percent more than ZIP files can. WinRAR's main features include strong general and multimedia compression, the ability to process non-RAR archive formats, ZIP compression and decompression, support for long filenames, programmable self-extracting archives (SFX), repair of damaged archives, authenticity verification, embedded file comments, and encryption. Unicode is supported in archive filenames, allowing non-English filenames to be handled painlessly. You can manipulate the parameters of many archives at once and view a volume sequence as a single archive. WinRAR can convert other archive formats to RAR and search for specified text and files in archives.
Version 3.71 corrects several bugs and improves processing of corrupt RAR archives.
What's new in this version:
Version 3.71 corrects several bugs and improves processing of corrupt RAR archives.
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User reviews of WinRAR 3.71
- Average user rating: 4.1 stars out of 1372 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 5 of 241 user reviewsSee all 241 user reviews
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38 out of 44 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
Pros: WinRAR has such an easy interface, and extracts quite an amount of file types. Very small in size, had it for years, hasn't crashed on me once, and it looks pretty nice (no bumpy ugly icons, etc.) I had it installed for a while, and even though it says it's not "free", it pretty much is. If you use it, and this window comes out asking you to enter key, you can just click "close" and continue using it, unless I am missing out on something. I always prefer this out of WinZIp.
Cons: Thankfully, this protect hasn't let me down yet. I'm glad I found no cons in this product! :)
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34 out of 37 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
Pros: Easy to use, quick and light on resources, its a must have program, for anyone who downloads a reasonable amount of files. With capabilities to pack files into numerous compressed formats, it makes it a near perfect program.
Cons: The only way i can see that this program could be improved is if it could also write .ISO files to disks, as that would be immensely useful for people who use torrents to download programs.
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34 out of 37 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
Pros: I run a website and the CMS I use has updates, themes, modules and stuff in .tar. Windows can't unpack that by itself. I've been using WinRAR for the last two years without any issues.
It packs and unpacks very well and in all different compressions.
Cons: There used to be an annoying screen telling me to register, but since I started using the right click extraction, it has not come to haunt me.
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34 out of 42 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
Pros: ....i never use to like those bulky books it leaves on other ppls puters but recently winzip wouldnt open a file I recieved. Thats when I realized if its zipped w/ winrar, winzip can't opened it. I then ralized WinRAR was waaaay easier to manage then winzip...but now i jus read other ppls reviews here & they say there's freebies. Imma check them out.
Cons: I have alot of zip files, so I don't like the bright bulky books WinRAR leaves all over. It's pretty when it's one or 2 but thats it. Also WinRAR should make it's own window like winzip does. Even when were not using it, it makes our right click window way to long
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31 out of 33 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Constantly updated, free upgrades"
Pros: After buying WinZip out of guilt several years back, I then found I had to pay for an upgrade. Instead I looked around and found WinRAR. I tested it for and bought a license. It handles RAR and ZIP formats (as well as a bunch of others) and you also get versions for platforms like PocketPC thrown in. The updates and features I actually want.
- See all 241 user reviews Write review
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