If you enjoy any kind of media that is electronic, be it books, music, pictures, movies, software etc, you will need some sort of zip download program. Zipping is a way to take a large file and make it smaller thereby enabling faster dowloads, using mathematical equations to shrink it down to size. Some programs can be made up to 85% smaller or even more using these zip utilities. This is very useful because a movie can be huge – hundreds of megs (Mb)or even gigs (Gb) in size.

Zip download programs do other things as well. They can take a bunch of files and put them in one zip file or “archive” folder so that it is easy to group files by a common topic. This means that, instead of searching for, say, all pictures of your recent trip you could download the zip file “recenttrip.zip” and have them all in the same place. This is extremely useful for archiving types of information where the people downloading it are likely to want easy access to everything in the same category.

On usenet particularly, zip download programs are essential, because many servers will not allow files beyond a certain size. These zip utility programs can break the files into many pieces and then post them on usenet. Someone else can come along, download all of the pieces, and put them together using the same zip download program which was used to create them. This is very useful for trading movies or music or pictures over usenet. It is not as important for text, because text is often much smaller than this, but not always. However always be aware of copyright restrictions if applicable.

Don’t make the mistake of paying for a zip download program, when there are so many available for free on the internet. Windows often even comes with one called winzip, but my favorite is called alzip (http://www.altools.net). It has a variety of different zip download formats which lets you compress or uncompress practically any kind of media file you are likely to come across. It has different settings for different amounts of compression so you can zip things quickly, or take longer, b ut make thm much smaller. In addition, you can use it to encrypt your zip files so that a special password is needed for anyone to view or open them. I zip files all of the time, because it aids in backing up the hard drive by cutting down the space the backup takes by %50 percent or more. It still takes a lot of room to back it up, so I have recently bought a new hard drive which I use for backing up zipped files and nothing else. This makes me feel much safer about my computer, because I know that nothing can ruin my data.

Get a free copy of the best free zip download program online here Alzip