Bitser comes with an interface that is divided into two areas. One is displaying the contents of the compressed files with the other is displaying the directory structure. This makes it much easier to add files to an compressed archive without having to drag and drop contents from the Windows operating system into the application. Like most file compression programs Bitser supports a wide variety of file compression formats including the popular zip, rar and 7z formats.

The output formats are limited to zip, 7z or exe though. Bitser comes with the standard functionality of all file compression programs like password protecting archives, drag and drop support and the integration into the operating system.

The interesting aspect of the program is the Explorer like interface. It can be used to browse many archives in relatively short time. The local file browser makes it possible to browse the computer system and inspect any compressed archives in no time. Another interesting option is the extensive reporting section which contains reports of previous operations. Reports contain information about files, sizes, dates, the compression algorithms, commands and results that can be saved in rft format for further analysis or archiving.

Bitser is a valid alternative for users who regularly work with compressed files in the Windows operating system. The interface makes it a tad easier to work with those files which puts it ahead of most other file compression programs. It does require the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 and will run on Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

If you are just looking for a file compression software that can extract archive contents you might be better off with a tool like 7-zip or the Universal Extractor.

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One of the main features was the ability to search for archives in folders. All discovered file archives would be automatically added to the queue and processed. It had some limitations though. The major limitation was that it could not unpack software installers. It is sometimes important to be able to unpack an installer to check the files that will be installed before starting the process. Sometimes a single file might even be all that is needed.

Universal Extractor works pretty much the same way that Extract Now does. It integrates itself into the right-click context menu and can process multiple software archives at once. It can be used to unpack multiple archives or installer that reside in the same directory at once.

The last sentence contains the biggest feature and a limitation. The main feature is that it can extract all kinds of software installers so that the files of each package become available. The limitation is that it cannot search in folders for archives.

To sum it up: Universal Extractor supports additional formats and the important software installers that Extract Now does not. The only unique feature of Extract Now is the ability to search for archives in folders which might not be needed at all depending on the amount of archives on a computer system.

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Next to that it can also unpack files from installation packages, it would be no problem for instance to unpack Windows Installer Package files (msi) or unpack the latest Firefox release with the Universal Extractor. It does not make that much sense to use a program like Winrar if you never pack files yourself, a tool that would extract all the archives would be more than enough.

Universal Extractor adds menu entries to the right-click men. You can choose to extract files, extract the archive in the same directory and extract the archive into a sub-directory.

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