Using a specially developed routine called 7z, based on LZMA, 7-zip achieves higher compression rate than WinZip or WinRar. It also packs and unpacks the formats ZIP, GZIP, BZ2 and TAR. In addition, it can extract several archives including ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR, Z, and RAR. If the program detects an Intel Atom CPU, it uses optimised algorithms specifically for this CPU.

Other features:

* Creates self extracting 7z archives
* Plugin for FAR Manager
* Supports hardware AES encryption modern Intel CPUs
* Multithreading to take advantage of multi-core CPUs
* Unpacks multi-volume CAB archives

Conclusion
7-Zip is ideal for NetBook users. The interface is rather spartan, but it responds quickly and requires little memory. Also useful is the optimisation for Atom CPUs.

Note
The program is also available in a 64-bit version.