some programs like jZip allow you to password protect zip files.w

Personally, I'd recommend 7zip, it archives and compresses extremely well, is very streight forward to use, and can unzip all the standard formats including Zip, rar and iso. Pluss, it's own 7z format is great for compression.

You can also add passwords and even specify the encoding you want if you like, though this just involves a list box.

Also, it's free! find it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzi … e/download Hth.

Sorry, i mean incripting for security reasons.

7zip will deffinately handle rar files, also, you can specify if you want the contents of a compressed folder to be just dumped in a given location or whether 7zip should create an original folder to stick them in which is helpful, particularly in unzipping games.

How long is a piece of string?

It really depends upon what your zipping, and also how much you actually want something zipped. Text, images and code files compress fairly well, while mp3's, sinse they are already a compressed audio format don't compress well at all, and even using ultra compression you can only usually get about a ten percent compression wrate, ---- say around 20-40 mb on a 300 mb folder.

Words or code however are a very different story. I've once for instance seen a 450 mb folder of coding files for a game compress down to a 50 mb one in 7z format which is pretty impressive.

Zipping is a process and therefore it depends upon how much compression you want (the more compression, the more time and computer power needs to go into creating the zip file).

I would imagine rar is the same, though 7zip can't create rar files sinse they're copywrite to winrar, though if someone else sends you a rar file 7zip is fine about opening the.

that being said, 7zips own 7z format is imho the most compressed thing around.

Btw, if you have windows set to hide file extentions, i'd advise you go into the file extention properties and get windows to show zip and 7z extentions. that way you can tell the difference betwene a zipped folder with the extention, and an unzipped folder without one.

Your looking for the folder options settings, you can find these either in control panel or in the menue of windows explorer.

You need the file extentions page, then go down the massive list box of doom until you find zip and 7z extentions, then go into advanced and hit "always display extention"

this is the way on xp, I'm not sure about other windows versions off hand.

there is an okay button. Okay and apply do exactly the same thing accept that okay closes whatever control it's attached to while applying the changes, while apply leaves it open. This is why quite a few boxes just have okay buttons.

I actually tend to hit Okay more often, sinse usually when I've finished making one set of changes I want the control cclosed anyway.

hth.

No problem, it's a handy windows thing to know, as is the business about the okay button.

I don' think it coul db e done.

Indeed, probably not possible, pluss it would take your computer considderable time and effort and probably tie it up for quite a few hours, which would be irritating.

finally, what would be the point? most of the point of zipping is to compress things to send to other people over the net. Generally, if you just want to store a lot of stuff it's far easier to just buy a bigger storage device than try and use zip to cram more stuff onto a smaller one, especially as being zipped stops a lot of files from running (one reason you always need to unzip any program before runnin it).

i think with most programs, if they are zipped, i think you have to unzip them before running them or else they will not work. I could never get the bgt sample games to work for months, but then i found out i had to actually extract the files. What's the difference between unzip and extract?

what does unzipping mean?