Product Reviews

With PentaZip's four-year pedigree, most people will just see PentaSuite as a ZIP utility on steroids. This is unfortunate, because PentaSuite also offers a file-management system where you can view, manage, compress, encrypt and deploy files - it even brings CD burning to the party.

It's impressive stuff, but do we need another ZIP utility? Microsoft incorporates basic ZIP functionality into Windows with its compressed folders feature, and demanding users will already be using the de facto compression client, WinZip, or the basic PentaZip, so why change?

Cost is an obvious hurdle, what with the Microsoft offering coming free with the OS. Plus, although WinZip will set you back just $29 (£18), many people (illegally) use the evaluation version long after the 21-day licence expires. Whatever your ethics, PentaSuite demands serious thought before you splash out £43.

Sure, everything but the kitchen sink is here, including multiple-volume-spanning ZIP archives and integrated virus scanning via your preferred anti-virus software. You'll also find strong archive encryption on a right-click, and this uses AES, Mard, DES, Triple-DES, Serpent and Blowfish rather than WinZip's simple password protection. It's even possible to create self-extracting archives larger than 4GB, which is more than you can say for Windows.

However, the real ZIP tests are speed and size,

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with faster and smaller being the ideal mantra. Using a 50MB mixed file folder on a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 PC, PentaZip took 11.2 seconds on maximum compression to produce a 38.2MB file, while WinZip took just 10.4 seconds to produce a smaller 37.2MB file. With minimum compression, however, both products hit a file size of 38.6MB, and PentaZip got there quicker - 6.7 seconds compared with WinZip's 9.6.

PentaSuite also has an advantage with its built-in file viewer, which supports more than 60 file formats, including HTML, RTF and TXT. You can even save in Microsoft Word's DOC format, convert from BMP to JPG and perform image- and text-editing tasks. It certainly does a lot for a file viewer - from this one application you can call up a hex editor, burn a file to CD, save as HTML and so on.

This does, however, beg the question of why you'd want yet another directory browser, especially when Windows Explorer already does a decent job. The same can be said for PentaPGP and the bundled FTP client. The latter is a nice part of the bundle but it's basic, and is unlikely to convert anyone who has already settled on the fully featured CuteFTP or WS_FTP applications.

The saving grace is the PentaWizard, which makes up for the other inconsistencies by making it easy to encrypt, transfer, compress and burn files. However, I'd be more enthusiastic about the suite as a whole if there was more consistency in the UI look and feel between the components. The differences are substantial enough to be distracting and force you to learn the nuances of each one.

Beyond the ZIP component, there's little to persuade you to buy PentaSuite. WinZip still remains far and away the easiest ZIP utility to use and requires a shallow learning curve compared with PentaSuite without sacrificing any core functionality. We advise purchasing WinZip or the standalone PentaZip 6 client instead, as you'll only want PentaSuite if you don't own applications fulfilling the other roles.