- Free (open source) (as opposed to WinZip and WinRAR) and still in development
- Excellent compression ratios and a customisable level of compression for many formats
- Support for opening ISO, WIM, RAR and many more formats
- 64-bit support
- Very small installer (only 1MB)
- Windows' in-built compression format does not warn you if the folder you're trying to extract the folders to is too deep - instead it gives you a red herring password prompt
- Opening ZIPS with Windows in-built can take a long time - 7-zip is near instantaneous for regular sets of files
There are a couple of points against:
- 7-zip isn't the most user friendly - WinZip is better, but it's certainly a lot less cluttered
- When creating multipart files, the 'DVD' option is set to 4480MB - if you try an burn a file this size with Windows's burning tool, it won't tell you that the file will actually get slightly trimmed. So I would recommend using CDburnerXP, or InfraRecorder instead, or if you reduce it to 4400MB then it will work fine.
