An extremely good reason for wanting a new Pkzip 2.5 for Dos can be easily seen by looking at a current version of the ``Archive Comparison Test''. I believe this is posted monthly to the Simtel archive and to appropriate newsgroups. For at least a couple of years, the ``newer'' archive programs, some of them free, have performed considerably ``better'' than Pkzip 2.4g. They compress a lot better, saving perhaps 25% more space than pkzip. And they often compress faster. Also, many archivers offer some form of real error recovery. That is, if some of the data in an archive get damaged, checksum type data can sometimes recover the lost data. Pkzipfix does not recover damaged data. Even the disk compression type software like Stacker, which have to decompress in real time, (i.e., as if nothing were happening) compress tighter than pkzip 2.4g. Stacker and the Microsoft equivalent, as I recall, claim to compress files on average to about 1/2 their size. Some of the better compression has been accomplished by a time honored Unix technique: creating a ``solid archive'' . That is, you glue all the files together into a single file; then compress the single file getting better compression. This technique has its good and bad points, and there are variations. Some of the better preformance was accomplished by better algorithms. Anyway, pkzip 2.4g has not been anywhere near the top of the list(s) on the Archive Comparison Test for quite a long time. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies.
