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<< winace sucks ass. can't handle .rars very well isn't very intuitive >>
thats funny... it's handled every rar i ever thrown at it... except the ones where the download got screwed. >>
Amen, I used WinZip back when I was a noob until one day I stumbled upon a .ace archive, said wtf, and got WinAce. Haven't looked back since.
WinAce is by far the best I have used of any archiver (generally meaning WinZip and WinRAR). I like the interface and the features. Everything seems to be natural to me. If you'd spend more than 10 seconds in it, you'll find everything you need. It has never failed to open anything other than of course corrupted archives.
WinAce is fast enough for me, I have never noticed a real difference in compression/decompression time between the various programs. It has volume (chunk file) support as well, and as for .PAR's... well I've never even heard of those so I can't comment. If the format becomes mainstream though I'm sure WinAce will add support for it.