This is one of my favorite open-source (free) compression utilities, by far.

Why would you need a compression utility?
Well, the more you work with computers and files the more you will know about the impotance of having to make room for even more files and, compressing them is the best way to achieve this matter.

Have you ever tried to send a really nice picture to one of your friends via email only to find out that the email was "too big"? Well, thats only one of the times you need a compression utility, their main purpose is to make files "smaller" while keeing their quality. Using one compression utility you could be able to send that picture to your friend, and perhaps, plenty more within the same email.

Ok, you might not send big pictures to your friends but, i am sure that you might have some pictures stored on your computer, just using up some space that you might need later on, well... you either move the pictures to a CD/DVD, buy an external hard drive, or just sit around until your computer is slower than a typewritter.

7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. This great utility supports  ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats. And, these guys even came up with their own compression format called 7z, which they claim is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format!

If you ever need to make some room in your computer, or just need to email some big files, you need to check out this great tool, remember, this is also an open-source tool so, if you dont like it, you can just uninstall it from your computer without any problems.

You can download this tool from the following link:

http://www.7-zip.org/