PeaZip is a Open Source packer that supports many formats, much like any other packer out there. The most command formats like zip, rar, ace, 7z are handled but also many lesser used ones like bz2, upx and cab. The user is asked during installation which context menu items he wants to add which is very user friendly. Most packers simply add their entries to the context menu even if the user would never use some of the options.
Once integrated users can right-click files and unpack them and create files as well using the main program interface. The user can choose between three options on how the progress is displayed for him. Two are graphical representations while one uses the command line. File checks can be performed as well displaying checksums / hash information of various algorithms which is great for verification purposes.
Peazip does have one problem though which makes it unusable for me. Peazip extracts selected archives at once. This means that if I select two archives they are unpacked at the same time which in turn means that the unpacking processes takes longer than in tools that unpack files after each other.
A quick benchmark with two rar archives had the result that PeaZip needed about twice as much time as IZarc to unpack those archives. Peazip was a little bit faster though when only one rar archive was unpacked.
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PeaZip 2.7 is available: http://peazip.sourceforge.net/
The latest version of PeaZip, 2.8 improved the scheduler and is now much more fast working on multiple archives at once.
As for what I see it is now clearly faster than Izarc 4.1 on single archive, and a little faster on multiple archives.
PeaZip has moved to Google Code, the new homepage is http://www.peazip.org