# Best ZIP compressor? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 20, 2001, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156 "2001-02-20T01:47:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Fenris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fenris/32/498_2.png) [@Fenris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fenris)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2001, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/1 "2001-02-20T01:47:51Z")
A friend of mine, who still does some work on an old DOS box, compressed an image with XTree Gold’s built-in compressor and squashed that sucker down about half a meg tighter than I’ve been able to manage on my Win98 system. I _cannot_ get XTree to work on my system (I suspect it’s got to do with the 32 bit file structure, but I’m not sure. If I do sucessfully get it to load, it doesn’t see any file, just directory headers. And the only way I can get it to even load is from Safe-Mode, Command Prompt Only.) Anyway, now my buddy’s being smug that his system has a better compression utility than mine, and I’m not puttin’ up with that! (and you thought nerds were uncompetitive!)😃 Anyone have a suggestion for a really, really good zip program? I _don’t_ care about ease of use, I’m perfectly comfortable with dos shells. All I care about is output file size. Every search I’ve done has come up with “very friendly interface” or “wonderfully user-friendly”. I don’t care if it’s user-hostile: I want compression, dammit! Any suggestions? Fenris ---
**Author:** ![cls](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e68b1a/32.png) [@cls](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cls)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2001, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/2 "2001-02-20T07:35:11Z")
I think this is what you’re looking for: [http://web.act.by.net/~act/act-canterbury.html](http://web.act.by.net/~act/act-canterbury.html) ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2001, 8:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/3 "2001-02-20T08:08:37Z")
I just put my hard drive on an anvil and hit it with a hammer. I think my hammer may be infected with a computer virus, though… my hard drive never works well after I do this. ---
**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2001, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/4 "2001-02-20T18:42:44Z")
When you say zip compressor, I assume you mean any compression utility, not just one that is pkzip compatible. To really win in the compression game it helps to have a utility optimised for the data you are compressing. What is it, wave files? Use Mpeg Audio Layer 3 (mp3) 32bit bitmaps? Try jpeg. Otherwise, I’m partial to bzip2. It has significantly better compressions rates than pkzip and variants, or so I’ve found. ---
**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2001, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/5 "2001-02-21T15:30:50Z")
Results of compressing [http://www.straightdope.com/index.html](http://www.straightdope.com/index.html) **original** 12971 index.html **compress** 6854 compress.html.Z **zip** (on maximum compression - level 9) 4698 pkzip.zip **gzip** 4579 gzip.html.gz **bzip2** 4505 bzip2.html.bz2 ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Cynical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ee59a6/32.png) [@Mr.Cynical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Cynical)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2001, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/6 "2001-02-21T17:02:53Z")
I happen to be very fond of WinACE as of late. Perhaps it is because of the cool graphics, but it seems to work well, too! ---
**Author:** ![Kyberneticist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dc4da7/32.png) [@Kyberneticist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyberneticist)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2001, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-zip-compressor/55156/7 "2001-02-21T17:20:15Z")
Show me the ratio. 🙂 How does WinACE do on my sample text file? BTW, slightly off-topic, but I’ve often wondered about increasing HTML efficiency. Is there any reason that the server could not send a query to the client to request existence of a compressor optimized for HTML tags (say, where each tag had a two-byte code, with additional bytes for options if necessary, and usual text compression) then engage in all further file transfers using a compressed version of the file? The server could have compressed and uncompressed side by side in directories so it wouldn’t have any additional CPU load. As for me, I tend to strip extraneous white space out of pages I won’t be editing much, but that’s hardly as big a saver as reducing web page sizes by a factor of 5 or 6 (just ordinary compression above obviously does a factor of 3 easily)