A relatively new program like HaoZip needs to at least match the functionality of those programs, or provide users with a unique feature that the other compression programs do not offer to stand a chance.

When you look at the application for the first time you may notice the similarities to the WinRar interface. You have the icon bar at the top, the path and navigational elements, a sidebar with a folder browser and the main area that displays the contents of the active folder.

Even the icons in the button bar are in nearly the same order. But similarities do not have to be a bad thing, as it could mean that users can start working right away without having to get to know the interface first.

But what about the program itself? HaoZip supports 49 different compression formats, from popular formats such as ZIP, RAR or 7z to lesser known formats like LZH, SPLIT or JAR. All or some of those formats can be associated with the program during setup, or under preferences after installation.

Additional customizations are available during installation. It is for instance possible to configure the program’s shell integration or log / history feature in detail. You can add a lot of items to the context menu. This includes standard extraction and archive creation options.

Only zip, 7z and tar archives can be created by Haozip, the remaining formats can only be unpacked. All standard compression features are supported. It is possible to password protect archives, encrypt file names, add comments or switch algorithms.

Additional features include:

• Repair, split, join, convert archives
• Create self-extracting archives
• Theme engine to install new interface themes
• Creation of different compression profiles
• Extraction of multiple archives each to their own distinct folder
• A 32-bit and 64-bit version is offered
• Built-in Tools, including image and text viewer, mp3 joiner, batch rename, md5 checksum calculator

The developer homepage is only available in Chinese which includes the online help. The program itself is offered as a multi-lingual version (Chinese / English).

Is there a reason to switch to Haozip if you are already using a program like 7-Zip, WinRar or Winzip? That depends. It boils down to the individual functionality. Maybe you do not want to pay each year to upgrade Winzip or WinRar, or you are missing support for jar or taz compression formats under 7-Zip. If you are currently missing a feature in your compression software, you may want to take Haozip for a test drive to see if it offers that feature. HaoZip is regardless of that a solid alternative for WinRar,Winzip and 7-Zip.

Haozip is offered on the developer website. It is best to use Google Translate to load the website unless you understand Chinese, that is. Your best bet is to download the multi-language version that is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows. The green version of good press (what a translation) could be portable versions of the compression software, but that has not been tested. (via Caschy)

Update: English version of the developer page is available, have added link above. No need anymore to translate the page’s contents first.

NTFS data compression has another advantage over popular file compression utilities. Since it is implemented in the file system the data compression is performed transparently. The filenames of compressed files stay the same and applications can access them as usual.

There are a few limitations though. One of the most important ones is that it is not possible to move compressed files to another file system. This means that it is not possible to move a compressed file from a NTFS file system to a Fat32 system.

AutoCompress is a lightweight portable data compression software that runs on all Windows NT based operating systems that make use of the NTFS file system. This includes Windows XP and Windows Vista. The tool can automatically compress and uncompress data in a specific directory. It does so by analyzing all files in a selected directory: age, size and data compression ratio.

The default values for compression are a file age of at least 28 days, a minimum size of 8192 bytes and a data compression ratio of at least 50%.

These values can be changed by the user. Similar values exist for uncompressing files of a selected directory.

AutoCompress is a sweet 13 Kilobyte data compression software. It could use some tinkering like implementing a browser to pick the directory to be analyzed or a better help file but those are minor issues. If you are looking for a good NTFS data compression software you might want to give AutoCompress a try.

Three parameters can be defined to determine if a file should be compressed or uncompressed.