Thanks again to everyone who’s been helping me out with all my computer questions. Here are some more for you…
I’ve only ever used WinZip to unzip files, but recently I’ve been wanting to try to ‘zip’ (does that sound right?) some files. I tried looking in the help section but I just got confused.
How do you ‘zip’ a file? (if you could just point me in the right direction that’d be great)
How do you change the ratio?
What effect does the process have on the file quality?
The easiest way to zip a file is if it has installed extra options in the Explorer menu. Depending on the version of WinZip it’ll look something like the picture below.
Or you can drag files into an open winzip window, it will add them to the zip file already open, or ask to make a new zip file.
The ratio is just how much it’s been able to compress it. Zip is a lossless format so whatever you get out will be exactly the same as what you put in. For example, a file that’s already compressed won’t compress much further and will have a low ratio; an uncompressed file will probably compress a lot and have a high ratio.
Don’t worry about degrading the quality of files; what comes out of a zip is exactly the same as what comes out.
If you compress things to a zip the fiddly way (ie. through the menu in an open WinZip window) you can change between a few different levels of compression; however the difference between them is negligible.
Because it’s lossless there is a limit to what can be effectively compressed… if something is compressed already there’s not much more winzip can do to make it smaller. Images such as JPEGs and most movies are already compressed, so there’s not much you can do with them.
Back when Windows was an add- on for DOS (the ONLY way to run a computer! Yeah, I know, that’s before your time, and I’m older than dirt ), PKZIP was run by text arguments and the various different compressions made a lot of difference. Some would compress more than twice as much as others, in fact you could even use PKZIP to password encrypt a file wilth out compressing it at all.
Anybody else remember this kind of stuff:
C:>pkzip a: secret .zip -&u –rp –ex –s c:*.bat
I remember command line archiving on the good ol’ Amiga 600 when I was <holds hand down low> so high… trying to work out how to use lzx. I faffed around with a blummin’ Amiga Shopper coverdisk for ages, but just couldn’t get at the flying toaster screensaver…
Yeah, I know, that’s before your time, and I’m older than dirt