The world is an almost unfathomably interconnected and technological place, and nothing illustrates that fact quite so well as the vast number of files being shared across the Internet every day. Whether it's emailing the latest YouTube sensation to your friends or sending a corporate ledger to your bosses in Hong Kong, file sharing is an essential part of 21st century life. But what happens when those files are huge - too huge to send - and you're on a deadline? Or maybe you just want to save hard drive space? If so, you can either cross your fingers and try to manually split or compress your larger files, or you can use some sketchy online service... or you can use WinZip.

WinZip is a very popular Windows archiving and file compression utility. It allows the end user to quickly and easily compress large files into a smaller size while maintaining the integrity of original file(s). This will allow you to save space on your hard drive, share files more easily, and of course, now that your files are smaller, you'll be able to have more of them. Use of the utility is a breeze to learn. You can either use the manual "classic" interface for custom jobs, or simply open the auto-wizard, and WinZip will take care of everything for you.

As popular as WinZip is, though, every piece of technology comes with both benefits and drawbacks. You can find some of WinZip's pros and cons below.

Pros

WinZip is very easy to use. It also has decent compression and decompression speeds.

Cons

WinZip is a Windows-only utility, which means Mac users and others will need to use their own OS' native programs or find one to download. This leads us to WinZip's biggest flaw: It's getting old. It doesn't support as many files as its younger sibling, WinRAR, accommodating only ZIP files, while than the latter can handle RAR, ISO, ZIP, and JAR files, among others. Additionally, WinZip's compression/decompression rates aren't as fast as WinRAR's.

Nevertheless, WinZip remains a popular and solid choice, and with the information you now possess, you are well-equipped to make that choice for yourself.