Me too, runs nicely on vista and win7.

Yeah, I hate 7zip.

No really I find WinRAR more helpful and quicker to use, but to be honest I haven't ever given 7zip a chance.

7zip is only low compatibility because it's relatively new; the 7zip format is better than the RAR format, and 7zip works with both.  7zip is also free.  Being free means it's gaining penetration relatively fast - it took many years for rar to take off (and it never really pushed zip out of the space anyway).  7zip has also had a 64-bit version for some time, and is extraoridnarily lightweight.

Not seeing any real reason to use WinRAR.  We all used it back in the day, but archive software (and containers) are constantly passing the baton.  I'm not going to shed a tear for PKZIP and ARJ.

It's probably just me, but I can't think of WinRAR without being glad I don't have to put up with nag screens with 7zip.

LOL I haven't bought WinRAR but haven't seen a nag screen in my life. And no I don't use a crack

With such large drives people hardly use compression anymore.
I do use it for storage of my picture files but thats about it. Just to get that extra space on my burnt DVD's.
But otherwise no, why bother.

1. Because the releases consists of small parts you don't have to worry about re-downloading the whole release if something goes wrong and a file gets corrupted.
   
   
2. You can control that everything has been downloaded correctly by checking against the SFV-file. Hence you will always know whether you've gotten a complete uncorrupt release of what you were downloading.
   
   This means that you will have the exact same files on your computer, when you've downloaded and extracted the release, as the person who first created the release. This instead of downloading an extracted version of the file which perhaps has been transfered a couple of hundred times from one person to another and where there is an overwhelming risk of transfer errors. This doesn't mean that the file won't work, but it can lead to colourdeviations or so called freeze-frames.
   
   
3. You can download from multiple sources at the same time - ensuring comformt and maximizing your download speed.
   
   
4. We ge a standardized way of sharing.

Save point 4 a BitTorrent client handles all those things internally. So in reality you are doing all those things twice. I'm never afraid of corrupt downloads. My torrent client will detect it and worst case scenario is I have to redownload 1 chunk which usually varies from 256KB - 4MB. Even better than compressing and partitioning files manually first.

A certain standard for sharing files might be handy but dividing files into smaller parts is not useful anymore. Besides I can redownload a 15MB faster than manually crc checking it.

You dont use torrents everywhere do you now.

Nothing wrong with standarization.

But i agree nowadays we dont need it as much as 5 years ago, we all have greater bandwidth and the torrent protocol have evolved and so have dc and whatever p2p apps.

Maybe not but I cannot for the life of me remember when the last time was I had a corrupted download. Sure, a year of 4 back my RAM was broken, but then again so where the rar chunks, sfv files and everything else, so partitioning didn't help either.

The only time I can remember having to deal with it on a regular basis was back when I used a 56k, and connections were dropped regularly. Then again downloading a 720p release with that isn't viable anyway.

Cutting up big files is a thing of the past. Compression oftentimes costs you more time than it saves you. Time to move on. I don't even think for a second when downloading a 2GB  demo from some site. The worst that can happen is a slow server and I have to wait a while.

256 MB/s you wish. That kind of defies the definition of gigabit

But it still takes a lot of time to compress 65GB, so what is the advantage to gain here? Unless you can compress on the fly, but I'm not sure if I could do that.

I'll stick to zip files. I don't hardly ever use any files that need to be zipped or unzipped.

Well then I'll stick to 7zip. I was just pointing out that I don't mess with .zip or .rar files often if at all.