Compressed files

[sippo]

For next year, I have been asked to install some software that can compress files.

 

Now there is the windows version, but are there any decent free alternatives out there?

 

What does everyone else use? Its for XP.

 

Can the windows compression shortcut be removed/added via GPO?

[SteveBentley]

7zip is decent and open source.

 

7-Zip

[LeMarchand]

7 Zip is free, but I would have thought that it would be easier to stick with the built-in utility for the average user.

[SteveBentley]

It has context menus, so it's not that different to XP's wizard. Plus it can handle the .rar files which our franchise course students keep sending us despite explicit instructions not to.

[Guest TheLibrarian]

We copied the "compressed (zipped) folder" link from the "sent to" context menu to the shared desktop, students drag and drop files / folders on that icon and Windows XP does the rest creating the archive in the folder containing the files / folders to be zipped.

 

It's been in place for ~6 months and not a single complaint / query so far.

[SteveBentley]

It might be worth clarifying what they mean by "software that can compress files", whether they are wanting archival compression like .zip and not something that can do a lossy compression of Powerpoint/Word files such as Compress, optimize and shrink PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets using PPTminimizer (from a quick google, no idea if it's any good).

[kennysarmy]

We copied the "compressed (zipped) folder" link from the "sent to" context menu to the shared desktop, students drag and drop files / folders on that icon and Windows XP does the rest creating the archive in the folder containing the files / folders to be zipped.

 

It's been in place for ~6 months and not a single complaint / query so far.

 

Nice solution.