14 DAY TRIAL // After almost three months of beta testing and a kickback from stable to beta version a couple of days ago, WinRAR reached the final version 4.00. The changes in this edition are pervasive and affect mainly the functionality of the application.
The most impressive improvements, though, refer to RAR decompression, which can now be up to 30% faster, depending on the file format you use. However, according to their list of changes this does not affect text compression.
Among the new things the new version brings to the table is a password manager that allows you to better handle the most used countersigns. Thus, when you need a password for a regular compression job all you have to do is pick one from the stored list.
Keep in mind, though, that the passwords are not encrypted in any way in the application. Anyone gaining access to the computer is able to see them unhindered.
When unpacking multiple archives you can now set WinRAR to use the same password for extracting them.
There are changes regarding the way data is extracted as the latest issue of the program features the possibility to extract relative paths instead of full ones.
Starting this edition WinRAR will no longer work on older Windows operating system, such as 98, ME and NT. The minimum requirement in this sense has been upped to Windows 2000. So if you plan on sticking to those old machines you won’t be able to benefit from version 4.00 of the software.
Some performance improvements are also counted in this release. The developer reduced the disk seek operation during recovery volume processing and the message list in GUI SFX archives no longer displays the names of all extracted items anymore. Only the error and the operation status are shown, causing lower memory usage and increased speed for this type of job.
More noticeable changes carried by this edition of WinRAR refer to showing progress of the entire operation on the software’s icon in the taskbar. This feature is reserved to Windows 7 users.
WinRAR is currently available in Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian Cyrillic, Serbian Latin, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai and Vietnamese for both 32 bit and 64 bit systems.
You can download WinRAR from here.
