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WinZip is admittedly the most popular Windows compression utility, or archiver. From the early DOS days on, there's been an ongoing race between WinZip and ARJ. It seems that they've both reached a kind of a limit and settled at roughly equivalent speeds and compression ratios. Personally, I like ARJ better because of its DOS environment and extremely powerful, if unwieldy, command-line options which make it the ideal solution for automated or scheduled archiving purposes.
Software Review - Pros
One of the best compression ratios I know of, at least on the Windows platform.
Software Review - Cons
I've never quite grasped how WinZip deals with directory structures, to be honest. It always seemed to me that unpacking an archive with WinZip gives you two options:
it will either dump all the files in the archive straight into your root C:\ directory, making a complete mess of it; or
it will unpack the archive into a subdirectory of the directory you chose, so instead of having your files all lined up nicely in C:\I_want_my_files_unpacked_here\, you'll have to dig into C:\I_want_my_files_unpacked_here\I_want_my_files_unpacked_here\ to find them...
And here's the interesting part: it's never you who decides which of the two options will it be, it's always WinZip!
As for manageability and ease of use, WinZip has been long since surpassed and outperformed by the almighty Windows Commander which can do anything WinZip can, and a whole lotta more.
User Report - Tips, Tricks and Tweaks
General
Windows Commander has an internal zip/unzip library, so that you don't even have to have PKZIP or WinZip installed to be able to zip and unzip files/directories.
