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Tired of the old nag window every single time you open a file with WinRAR? No, I won’t give you a working serial key or hacks to disable it. :-)

However, I suggest you to try out 7zip, an open source freeware archiver program. It shares many of the features WinRAR or WinZIP supports and even more! 7zip supports 30 different formats including rar, zip and tar. Users have reports better compression rates than competing shareware alternatives, as seen on their homepage.

Why should you switch? Well, most people are already down to switch over just to avoid the nag window reminding you to register in WinRAR. If that’s not enough, 7zip also supports generating a checksum, extracting icons from executables, graphics files from flash files and more.

The downside is the relatively dated Windows 98-era GUI, but installing a theme manager like 7zTM will let you customize the graphical aspect of 7zip. Even though it’s open source, 7zip is only available for Windows along with an unofficial port for Linux.

Get it here! 64-bit users should get the 64 version on the download page.

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