Winrar

[alpha_hazard]

Can somebody please explain to me what is so special about RAR compression? I get these stupid files all the time and it irritates me how ridiculously complicated it is to extract a file...with windows' software I click extract and then OK, and it takes me directly to the files I just extracted, with Winrar there is no automatic stuff...I have to open the file in a program, click extract, tell it where to extract to, close the program and then navigate to where I extracted the file...all for what? better compression? I seriously doubt the amount of compressioned gained is not really all that much when you are just compressing a few pictures...please, can anybody explain this stupid program to me?

[oosik]

several reasons why ppl use it, one of which it allows to break large archives into parts. as for extracting, just right click and choose extract to.....easier than opening prog.

[glc]

If the Winrar extensions aren't in your right click menu, you need to enable them in the Winrar program options. Options, settings, integration, shell integration, integrate Winrar into shell. Beats XP's zip folders all to heck if you ask me, you may like it so much you will associate Winrar with all your archives.

[alpha_hazard]

First...I have no clue what that means...Break Large Archive into parts

Second, I have since put the RAR options in right click, but it still does not allow me to go directly to the folder after extracting. I thought there was an option in the right click menu to explore the root directory, but that's not showing up either, so the fact remains that I still have to navigate to the extracted file manually...I prefer not to extract to my desktop so maybe I am missing something, did I accidently disable the right click Explore option?

[shadowbreaker513]

Technically you usually don't even need ot extract the stuff first. I just do an open file, the rar opens, I start the install file or whatever it may be, and close the rar which gets rid of it.

[alpha_hazard]

I'll have to try that, I have noticed that with Executables you have to extract the zip first whereas with any other files you can view them anyway (of course it really does Extract, just into a temporary file...)

[glc]

Yep - just select Open with WinRAR - the archive opens in the program and you can then do what you want with the files. Each file will also have right click options from within the winrar window.

[bigandy]

Originally Posted by alpha_hazard First...I have no clue what that means...Break Large Archive into parts.

Let's say you had a home movie that was several hundred MBs in size, and you wanted to send it to some one in an email, or put it up on a personal FTP server. Rather than just sending them, or having them download, the giant file, you break it up into rars of smaller file sizes like 10-20MBs, or whatever you chose. So instead of just downloading the large file home movie.rar, they download home movie.r00, home movie.r01, home movie.r02, etc., and then once they have downloaded all the parts, they open up one of them in WinRAR and it will extract the file from all of the archives.