Is it worth the money?
Winzip 21 Pro
Writing about Winzip took me back to my first exposure to PCS and the heady days of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Back then, Winzip was the only serious option if you wanted to create folders of compressed files so that you could cram that little bit more into the meagre storage space offered by your floppy discs.
Fast-forward 20-odd years and the landscape of compressed files is much changed. Windows now has its own, built-in ZIP software, while free Zip programs like Peazip and 7-Zip offer all the tools you’ll ever need. So what does Winzip offer today? Well, let’s open it up and find out.
Confusing pricing policy
The price you see at the top of this page is what you pay for the standard version of Winzip. This is despite the fact that when you first land on its website, the Buy Now price (see screenshot above) clearly states £25.95. And so I spent time clicking every link I could find on the site, but still couldn’t get it at that price.
If an unexpected £5 price hike wasn’t bad enough, Winzip then tried to coax me into buying its optional Upgrade Assurance plan (£5.95 for 12 months). This lets you download the next version of Winzip (Winzip 22 at the time of writing) without paying again. Now, I’d expect to pay to upgrade complex, specialist programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Office, but paying that sort of money for an updated Zip program stuck in the craw. Don’t be tempted to pay £8.95 for a backup CD of Winzip either. There really is no need for such a tiny download.
The free version is another oddity. To get it go to www.snipca.com/22508 and click the Try It Free button. Just be sure to click Decline when prompted to install the Chromium browser and Bing extension (see screenshot below left). Once installed, open Winzip and click the Use Evaluation Version button to use Winzip without paying for it for two years. Yes, the trial period really does last two years! After that you need to pay £31.14 every two years, although we’d be surprised if you lasted two weeks with it.
Open zipper
So, what does Winzip actually do? Well, it zips and unzips files as you’d expect – and does it very well. Right-click a file or folder and you’ll see options to use Winzip to compress/uncompress it. I also liked that these options were also present
in Microsoft Office, so I could zip and email a document directly from within Word or Excel – simply click File then ‘Zip and Share’ (see screenshot left).
From here on Winzip gets more and more bloated. Zipshare is a good example of this. It’s completely unnecessary online-storage service (like Google Drive and Dropbox). If you have an existing online-storage account it’s best to use that. Click Settings, Cloud Services, ‘Set default cloud service’, ‘Use other Cloud Storage Services’, then choose your online storage service. Other needless features include a converter that turns Office documents into PDFS (Office does this anyway) and tools that reduce the size of (already compressed) MP3S and JPEG images.