Just wondering, I have win xp pro and I was thinking about buying winzip to compress all my jpeg photos on my computer…Then I heard off the cuff that winzip came bundled with XP. Is this true? If so how do I compress these files with it? If not what should I do to compress these files?
Thanks a bunch.
There’s a zip utility built into XP – right click on the desktop or an explorer window, select “New -> Compressed (zipped) folder”, and then drag the files you want to zip into it.
This uses the same format as WinZip, but isn’t technically the same thing. It’s also limited to just the basic compress/decompress; you can’t do things like set a password on a zip file.
Yep.
Highlight the items you want to zip.
Right click the mouse. Choose the option of “Send To:…”
From the Send To, choose Compressed Folder. That makes the .zip file.
Done.
Sorry, just read this more closely. JPEG files are already highly compressed, and it’s unlikely that they will compress significantly smaller using ZIP (or any other compression method, for that matter).
Thanks all! I appreciate it…
You don’t need to buy WinZip. There’s perfectly good free utilities like TUGZip or 7-Zip that work just as good and support additional compression formats.
I always found the built in support in Windows to be painfully slow, so I use 7-zip myself. Don’t know if Windows built in support is better nowadays or not.
True, but you’ll at least save the “cluster overhang” - the leftover space at the end of each file. If the files are large, this probably still doesn’t amount to enough to be worth it. Probably something around 1 or 2 K per file, depending on your cluster size.
And remember, if files are already compressed sometimes compressing them again with another method makes them larger.
There is one additional advantage of ZIPping files, even ones that won’t compress, and that is combining them into a single file. If you prefer storage that way, ZIP to it.
You may want to investigate alternatives to the inbuilt compression if you are compressing very large files or very many files. About 2 years ago, one of my users was having problems compressing particular datasets (20GB-50GB) which should have been highly compressible but weren’t. Windows file-level NTFS compression gave up at some point and Zip wasn’t working too well. We found that the problem was the frame size. He switched to 7-Zip and is still using it quite happily.