- Quick specs
- Price: Free to try (40-day trial, some features disabled) $29.00 to buy (Buy it now)
- Operating system: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/NT
- Date added: September 24, 2007
- Total Downloads: 96,145,879
- Downloads last week: 388,617
- Product Ranking: #1 in File Compression
- See full specifications
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A newer version of WinRAR is available.
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 1586 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: CNET Staff on November 08, 2008
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.More popular File Compression downloads
- 393,739 downloads 1. WinRAR (32-bit)
- 105,155 downloads 2. WinZip
- 93,296 downloads 3. WinRAR (64-bit)
- 23,126 downloads 4. 7-Zip
- 16,735 downloads 5. Free RAR Extract Frog
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User reviews of WinRAR 3.71
- All versions: 4.2 starsout of 1586 votes
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- 4 stars
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- 1 stars
- Current version: 4.3 starsout of 321 votes
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- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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5 stars
38 out of 44 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Love it!"
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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5 stars
34 out of 37 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Brilliant"
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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5 stars
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.
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5 stars
34 out of 37 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Use it all the time"
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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5 stars
18 out of 18 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Awesome Program"
Pros: Such a small download, but ever so powerful. Opens the biggest of files then for FREE. I had a 2.12 GB file it opened in about 4 minutes then. Great Program and the it has a Wizard inside too, he will guide you thru everything you need to do then. They dont both you to register then either for quite a long time.
Cons: Nothing is bad about this program.
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5 stars
14 out of 14 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Everything I need."
Pros: I love this program. Before I had this program I could only extract .zip files and couldn't do anymore than that. With this I can reformat any file or program on demand to .rar or extract files from a .rar file. All it takes is a right click and you're done. :) Very Easy :)
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5 stars
14 out of 14 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"excellent."
Pros: i preffer win rar more than win zip, its more easy andmore simplicity in usual.
Cons: thanks a lot for the free downloading.
Summary: null
i would like to updating the existing issue
Updated on Sep 7, 2008 -
5 stars
14 out of 15 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"great!"
Pros: very easy to use, covers multiple forms of unzipping, haven't had any problems
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5 stars
11 out of 11 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"The best I've ever used."
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5 stars
11 out of 11 people found this review helpful
Version: WinRAR 3.71
"Really Great"
Pros: It's a wonderful Time saver plus the bonus side of it is, that for the dumber folk's like myself, who can't follow direction to well...lol. it's so easy from installation to useing it,,, just like A B C.. I have used others, but none come to easy as WINRAR, thanx to the good folks who came up with this product, I daily unzip many many folders etc..
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