Tip 108: Really Good Software Part 11, 7-Zip

Simple, lightweight, fast open source, flexible, powerful, and free. 7-Zip is an awesome compression/decompression tool. It's easy to use and does its job way better than say... WinZip. 7-zip also has its own zipping protocol, .7z, which is better that .zip and .rar somehow, but 7-Zip can handle those too.