- Quick specs
- Price: Free to try (40-day trial); $29.00 to buy
- Operating system: Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 98
- Date added: August 19, 2009
- Total Downloads: 84,385,057
- Downloads last week: 362,232
- See full specifications
Tested spyware free 
CNET editors’ review
Reviewed by: Seth Rosenblatt on November 08, 2008
There are plenty of solid compression utilities to choose from, but this shareware powerhouse offers the features and ease of use that place it at the top of the compression category. WinRAR is easy to use, lightweight, and flexible.
An intuitive interface lets you mouse over icons to see their functions, and if you don’t like their candy-coated appearance, you can always choose from several themes at the developer’s site. The Folder Tree Panel makes sifting through your directories to find files easier than ever. But once you see the size savings of a RAR archive, with a compression ratio of 8 percent to 15 percent better than the ZIP format, you’ll understand why so many users and developers are making the switch from other apps. With virus scans now integrated and minor interface tweaks for Vista, only the slightly slower decompression speed holds the app back.
Beyond its good looks and right-click readiness for basic compression and unzipping, WinRAR offers unpacking support for a large number of archive formats, including TAR, ACE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, and ZIP. WinRAR’s advanced features are icing on the cake, with Unicode support for international formatting, embedded file comments, damaged archive repair, archive locking, self-extracting archives, and easy encryption. There’s also the option to automatically delete temporary files and just-archived files. Anyone seeking an all-in-one archiving solution would be remiss to not check out WinRAR.
Watch the CNET video review of WinRAR (32-bit):
Publisher’s description
WinRAR is a 32-bit / 64-bit Windows version of RAR Archiver, the powerful archiver and archive manager. WinRAR’s main features are very strong general and multimedia compression, solid compression, archive protection from damage, processing of ZIP and other non-RAR archives, scanning archives for viruses, programmable self-extracting archives(SFX), authenticity verification, NTFS and Unicode support, strong AES encryption, support of multivolume archives, command line and graphical interface, drag-and-drop facility, wizard interface, theme support, folder tree panel, multithread support and Windows x64 shell integration. WinRAR provides complete support for RAR and ZIP archives and is able to unpack and convert CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, Z, 7-Zip archives. WinRAR is available in over 40 languages.
CNET Editor’s Note: This version is the new release of WinRAR for 32-bit systems. If you are looking for the 64-bit version, go to the product page for WinRAR 3.90 64-bit.
What’s new in this version:
- WinRAR version for Windows x64 is available. If you use Windows x64, it is strongly recommended to install 64 bit WinRAR version. It provides a higher performance and better shell integration than 32-bit version.
- RAR compression speed is improved for multi-core and multi-CPU systems. This improvement is most noticeable in Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.
- “Remove duplicate folders from extraction path” option in “Settings/Compression” di… see all new features
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