Haozip – a freeware compression tool for Windows

Haozip is a free alternative for popular softwares like Winzip and Winrar. It can uncompress around 50 different formats including .ZIP and .RAR

Besides extracting and compressing archive files, Haozip has several useful functions, like checking an archive for errors and repairing damaged archives. It can even calculate MD5, Sha1 and CRC32 checksum for files. This can be useful to check the integrity of files. The main window of  Haozip can also be used to browse your computer for archives you may wish to open or to create new archives.

The Main UI:

Haozip has a clean and user-friendly interface. The toolbar has all the basic functions you would need to extract an archive or create a new archive. You can open or create archives by double-clicking on the file or right-clicking on the files for more options.

Built-In Image and Text Viewer:

You can view images and read text files stored in archives directly from the application. It supports several image formats as shown below in the screenshot. You can also convert images to different formats.

Just double-click on the text or image file to open it with the built-in viewer. You can also use a different viewer of your choice, to alter the settings check the option menu.

File compression formats:

Haozip can compress files in three formats, 7z,ZIP and TAR. You can add a password to protect your archives.

It even allows you to create Self-extracting archives and add comments to the archives you have created. This is useful in case you have to share some files via a cloud service like Dropbox or as an email attachment.

Context Menu Support:

Haozip can be added to the Windows Explorer Context menu and has several useful commands for extracting files from an archive and creating a new archive. You can disable shell integration from the Options menu.

Context menu options for creating an Archive

Context menu options for opening an archive

 Virtual CD Support:

This is a rather unusual option when it comes to file compression utilities. I was surprised to find that it supports a large number of popular formats such as ISO, MDS, MDF, CCD, CUE, IMG, UDF and NRG. I mounted a CCD (CloneCD file) and an ISO and they worked perfectly.You can even extract the files from the mounted image using Haozip

Themes (Skins):

You can download various skins for the Haozip Interface. Though the skin downloader shows the screenshots in Chinese, the downloaded skin supports English.

In addition to this Haozip also comes with a Trojan Horse checking engine, I didn’t test this as it isn’t useful to me. You can also customize the appearance of the User interface by adding or removing toolbars and even change the font it uses.

Pros:

• Can extract from many different archive formats.
• Can view images and read texts without extracting an archive.
• Password protect archives.
• Beautiful skins.
• Virtual CD support adds some value.

Cons:

• No portable version available.
• Only three compression formats are available.

I tested it on my computer running Windows 8 Pro and it works fine.

Download Haozip from here.

Note: 64 bit version is available here