WinRAR 3.80

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• Quick specs
• Price: Free to try (40-day trial); $29.00 to buy
• Operating system: Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98
• Date added: September 29, 2008
• Total Downloads: 80,341,730
• Downloads last week: 343,185
• See full specifications

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A newer version of WinRAR is available.

Download the latest version | Learn more about WinRAR (32-bit) 3.90

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CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: Seth Rosenblatt 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 place it at the top of the compression 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 TAR, 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. There's also the option to automatically delete temporary files and just-archived files. Anyone seeking an all-in-one archiving solution would be remiss to not check out WinRAR.

Publisher's description

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 3.80 adds decompression support for AES-encrypted ZIP files, improved display information, more context-menu options, and a more secure method of deleting temporary files.

CNET Editor's Note: This version is the latest stable release of WinRAR. If you are looking for the most recent beta version, see the product page for the WinRAR (32-bit) beta or the WinRAR (64-bit) beta.

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