Saturday, February 10, 2007

PAQ7 vs. ZIP

(PAQ8 was mentioned in the forums page to be included in KGB archiver 2.0, but the beta version has PAQ7)

Fact known in life, everybody uses zip a lot! Zip can be decoded by every OS quite easily and fast. Zip rules sourceforge.org source archives and executables (although Rar archives have been seen there).

Fast forward 7 years into the super processors of tomorrow (quadcore K8L and Core 2 Duo Extreme) which can make 35% better compression ni amazingly high compression ratios that PAQ7 will give you. Zip still wins for any archive.

For a 35 MB file it will take a good 40 minutes on a Pentium 4 with 2 GB of RAM (and it's running in background on taskbar) and Zip will do this in under 50 seconds with 35% worst compression. So download and extraction of the zip file would take less no matter what broadband you have then the time saved by downloading a much smaller KGB file!

Now if you want to cram 35% more information on a CD using KGB is a good idea. I would do it. In fact I put all my files in 7zip now-a-days, but that is just me. Everybody who makes a open source program wants to put it in zip /w bzip2 compression container!

Point is doesn't anyone feel zip is dated and want to use PAQ7 in KGB Archiver 2.0 (comes out February 14)?

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