WinAce 2.69

WinAce is meant to provide the user with a means to create, modify or extract compressed files of different types.

WinAce is not limited to ACE compression formats alone - other popular formats, such as ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB can be used for compression; as for extraction. WinAce can decompress formats as follows: ACE, ZIP, LHA, MS-CAB, RAR, ARC, ARJ, GZIP, TAR, BZip2, ISO-Images, ZOO.

WinAce is very easy to use! To open an archive linked with WinAce you only need to double click it in any shell environment, like the Microsoft Explorer. When running WinAce, archives may also be browsed for and/or opened by using the File/Open command. WinAce can also be used as a file manager shell. It supports operations like copying, moving or deleting files as well as viewing text and commonly used graphic files.

Archives opened with WinAce are handled like ordinary directories. This basically means that archive files can be opened or displayed by the internal viewer by double clicking on the archive name. WinAce has also full Drag&Drop support.

Other features include:
Self-Extracting archives (SFX modules) for ACE and ZIP,
encryption of archives,
recovery data for corrupted archives,
AV signatures (authenticity verification) for ACE-archives,
HTML, ANSI, and ASCII-comments for ACE- and ZIP-archives (displays comments of any other formats, too),
Integrated viewer and quick viewer for Word-documents, RTF-, HTML-, ASCII- and commonly used graphic files,
automated installation of archives containing "SETUP.EXE" or "INSTALL.EXE".

Pluses: Compared to WinRar and WinZip, WinAce came out third when it comes to compression rate and speed : a directory containing multimedia and text files in total size of 104 Mb compressed at a normal rate by WinRar resulted in a 64 Mb in 51 seconds compared to 76,2 Mb in 17 seconds for WinZip and 64,2 Mb in 1 minute and 11 seconds for WinAce.
In addition to the Windows version there is a DOS version available which also includes an easy-to-use shell and several command line versions for various operating systems (DOS, Win32 and OS/2 as of 6/99).

Drawbacks / flaws:You cannot archive to .rar, which is quite a common type of archive.

In conclusion: With an easy, user configurable and clearly arranged shell and a good compression rate (if you are not in a hurry) we may say that WinAce is a good choice for compressing/decompressing files.


Source: www.soft32.com