A Zealot Zeroes in on the Zip Zone

Well let us have a look at what there is to all the Zip! There are several popular programs/utilities that have Zip in the name, and I want my readers to know more than zilch about it.

First, there is Zip as in the program WinZip and others. These programs are for you to be able to compress and (mostly) decompress files so that they take less time downloading from the Internet. Often large files, e.g., drivers for printers and scanners may be compressed (zipped) as you receive them. These files may be unzipped after receipt if you have an “unzipper” like WinZip in your computer. How files are compressed and such is not the point here. (We will cover that a little later in this article.) We just want to use the files and must unzip them before we can do so.

Where would you find a free Zip program? Put the word Zip in your favorite search engine. There will be references to at several kinds of zip. One is for Zip Codes, which I will not bother about and another will be Zip programs such as the above. The major suppliers are WinZip, Zip/Unzip and Free Zip.

It is a good idea to download one of these to have in your arsenal of utility tools. Some are freeware, some are on free trial where you get so many unzips before you have to download it again or pay a small fee. Some are shareware, meaning it is meant to be free but the computer nerd who created it will appreciate a small payment on your part.

If you have a Zip program available in your computer, you can turn it on and it will search for any zipped files you have downloaded and then unzip them. These are normally .exe files and so you would then click on the file to open it for your use.

You can find many places to download Zip utilities. If you want a specific site to do this, I will be glad to suggest one if you write me at the address below, otherwise try the sites that show up in your Zip search as suggested above.

Now just a quick word about compression before I go on. Here is a quote from Kim Komando (darling of the nerds) about .Zip files. “Think of vacation time and your suitcase. You plan a trip to the Bahamas, and you are going to be gone for 10 days. You will need to pack a lot of stuff, right? You fold everything and cram it into your suitcase, until the lid will not close. So, you sit on it and bounce up and down until you manage to close one of the clasps. Then you get to sunny St. Croix (sic), check into your hotel and open your suitcase. The lid flies open and all your stuff goes “POOF!” and flies all over the room. The suitcase is the finished ZIP file, and all the things inside are the program files you are after.”

The reality is that files are compressed by eliminating redundancies in the file. This is called lossless compression, which means every bit in the file can be restored precisely by decompression. As the Zip program reads an uncompressed file, it examines the file for recurring patterns of data. It writes the pattern to a dictionary which is stored as part of the compressed file. Where the pattern would have been written to the disk, there is a much shorter pointer that tells where the omitted pattern can be found in the dictionary. On the average, files are likely to be reduced to about half the original size.

Now the other Zip you may have heard about is a Zip Drive. This is something unrelated to zip and unzip. A Zip Drive is an external, portable drive similar to a hard drive on which you can store data. The disk in it is removable and can be put under lock and key. The disks can hold varying amounts of data but a popular size is 250MB. The company that makes these drives is “Iomega” and they can be found easily on the web.

OK, why do you need this? If e.g., you have a small hard drive to start with and need more hard drive space, you can permanently plug a Zip Drive into a parallel or usb port (depending upon which type you buy), and run it as another drive, e.g., an “E” drive. As long as the drive is turned on, (it has it’s own power supply,) the drive will appear in your Windows Explorer or My Computer as an existing “removable” drive. Therefore, you can save stuff just as you would to the hard drive “C.”

The advantage is that if your Hard Drive crashes, your Zip Dive will still be OK, and you can take the Disk out and save it somewhere and also keep enough disks at hand such that you can make your Zip drive capabilities limitless. Another great use for a Zip Dive is to move all your important data from your existing computer to a new one so that you can start out your new computer with all the files you want ready to work for you. All you will have to do is reload the application/program itself.

You can also share large files with someone who has a Zip Drive, of course, and many people actually have these drives built-in. They are also great for backing up your important files and the Zip Drive installation disk has some keen software for making the backup job easy.

I hope that zips that up.

Hobie Lunin is a Computer Consultant and Instructor. He can be reached at: mouseclix2@yahoo.com. Previous articles are at http://mouseclix.tripod.com as well as information on where you can take free computer classes with him.