At the end of the week, a good idea would be to archive your work and store it in a safe place for further retrieval, and if you're using a computer for your work like most of us do, then a specialized software is the right tool to use in order to accomplish this task.

Today's archiver is called 12Ghosts Zip and its latest version, 8.09, was launched on the 5th of October. Unfortunately, what I have here is an evaluation version that should probably be registered after 30 days of use, and I say "probably" because I wasn't able to find any information about this. Anyway, one thing I can tell you for sure, the program's price is 29.95$, and this program should offer a lot to make it an interesting choice for the money.

12Ghosts Zip's setup package has 2.5MB in size and installing it was a piece of cake, but for most programs, this part is not a problem. The battle starts once you fire up your new software for the first time, and this time, it happened exactly that... I guess the time has come to check the interface and features available here, don't you think?

Every time I come across a commercial product, I expect more than what I get from its good freeware competitors, and this time I can't make an exception. The bad part is that 12Ghosts Zip’s interface doesn't live up to my expectations at all, and it is nowhere near, either. Yeah, right, we can award it a tiny white ball for being well organized and easy to use, but a hammer and a nail are also simple and easy to use, although you can't break concrete walls with them...

What we get inside this program's main window is the usual menu bar, the toolbar and a work area. Before moving on to the features, I have to tell you about the View icon from the toolbar. There's nothing special about it, apart from the fact that it looks like ... Look at it and fill in the space as you consider, because now, I will try to tell you some words about the few features of this program.

OK, so I am going to pay for an archiver, but can it handle at least ISO, RAR, ARJ, ACE, 7Z, ZIP and PAK files? Nope. So...what do we have left? 12Ghosts Zip can handle ZIP and self extracting ZIP archives. Well, this is just a little better than nothing, isn't it? Sad and true, but maybe there's something more...

Oh, yeah, speed! This program claims to be faster then WinZip, but the test was performed some years ago on a PII233 system against WinZip 7 SR-1, and today, the speed of an archiver that uses only the old ZIP format doesn't matter much, really. If you want good compression, you don't use ZIP, and if you want speed, you use store only mode and that's all.

If you're waiting for something more, I am sorry to say that you won't find anything to be worthy of your time here. There are plenty free ZIP archivers that can do much more than 12Ghosts Zip, so you can take the money for it and spend them on beer without any regret. Now, it's time for the conclusions, and I don't feel they're going to be favorable...

The Good

12Ghosts Zip is easy to use, fast and reliable.

The Bad

This program has a huge price when looking down its features list - it only offers support for ZIP compressed files, its documentation doesn't look as it should and its interface looks like being brought back from the past...the distant past!

The Truth

Beam me up into the future, give me a billion dollars and a choice: buy this program and keep the money or get back today and finish this review. Despite the temptation, I'd get back here and do one of the things I do best. I guess I didn't say this before, but I am saying it now: this program is completely worthless! Move on please, move on, we have better things to do...

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: