WinRAR 2.90

• Quick specs
• Price: Free to try (40-day trial); $35.00 to buy (Buy it now)
• Operating system: Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98
• Date added: October 01, 2001
• Total Downloads: 71,544,207
• Downloads last week: 316,497
• 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: 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, a recent addition to the interface, makes sifting through your directories to find files for archiving 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 compression apps. You might even be prepared to forgive the slightly slower decompression speeds and lack of integrated virus protection.

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, repair of damaged archives, archive locking, self-extracting archives, and easy encryption. Anyone seeking an all-in-one archiving solution would be remiss to not evaluate WinRAR.

Publisher's description

WinRAR is a 32-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager. RAR files can usually compress content 8 to 15 percent more than ZIP or ARJ files. WinRAR's main features include strong general and multimedia compression, the ability to process of non-RAR archive formats, long filename support, programmable self-extracting archives (SFX), damaged-archive repair, authenticity verification, embedded file comments, and encryption. Unicode is supported in archive file names, allowing non-English file names to be handled painlessly.

Version 2.8 made it easier to create your own RAR SFX-based installers, and features a new look, better security for protected archives, the ability to manipulate the parameters of many archives at once, and the ability to view a volume sequence as a single archive.

This update features many new options, including extraction-only support for BZIP2, JAR (Java ARchive), and ACE 2.0 formats. You can now use full file paths such as d:\path\name in the exclude lists and x switch when archiving (earlier versions understood only relative file paths). The choice "Never" has been added to the file-overwrite dialog. The "Extract Here" item has been added to archive context menus, allowing you to unpack archive contents to the current folder.

Note: In this 40-day trial, the AV seal creation and error logging are disabled. A single user license is $35. It is recommended that you uninstall previous versions of WinRAR before installing version 2.9.

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