Today, we had an antivirus solution and a backup tool, and I guess that an archiver can close the triad successfully, so here it is: ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you ZipX!

This program's last version is 1.6 build 468, and what I have here is a 30 days trial version without any other limitations. The price of the full version is 24.95$ and it seems very high to me at this point, but let's not rush things and take it slowly. The installation package has 3.1MB and it was very much a piece of cake to have ZipX all set up and ready to go. These being said, let's check the interface and features available here, shall we?

ZipX has a simple yet good looking interface, and the difference between what I see now and an outdated interface are the icons from the program's toolbar and nothing more. ZipX doesn't have skins, but you can change the colors of the interface as you wish, and it doesn't end here. The best part about this program's interface is its ease of use, since all you can see here is a menu bar with seven menus, the toolbar and the main work area.

Moving on to the features part, I must say that I am very disappointed because this program can't open more archives at once, and that's not something to be proud of, especially because we're talking about a commercial application! Another thing missing here is the support for additional plugins, but let's see what we get, because I can start an endless list with things missing: tomato sauce, French fries, Italian pizza...

The most important thing that we can get with ZipX is a wide range of file types supported - this program can create ZIP and CAB files, but can read RAR, TAR, GZIP, ACE, ARJ, BZ2 and many others.

Moving on to the safety issue, I can tell you that ZipX supports extraction and creation of 256bit AES encrypted archives and can decode UUEncode and XXEncode Internet formats.

For a long time, an archive was considered large when it didn't fit on a floppy disk, then came the CD, and now we're living in the DVD era. A "large" archive these days is usually over 1 or 2GB in size, but you don't have to worry about that, because ZipX supports huge files without problems, with sizes over 4GB, and can also pack files that are larger than 4GB.

This program has an easy to use wizard that can be used for creating new archives or extracting and adding files to existing ones, the current archive can be sent through e-mail, your favorites are very easy to manage and there may be even something more to discover, but the important topics are already a part of the past, so I'll leave a little exploring to you and I'll move on to the conclusions.

The Good

ZipX is easy to use, fast and reliable. The features it offers are average, and the documentation that comes with the program is well done, although it can get even better.

The Bad

There are two ugly things that I noticed about this program - the fact that you can't open more archives at once and its price. This is not really bad, but when you ask money for things available for free, it makes you wonder what's the catch...

The Truth

It's really sad to see companies that try to sell products that you can easily get for free, and this is one of those cases. ZipX is a good program, being very easy to use and supporting enough archive types to make it an interesting choice, but I wouldn't pay for it in a thousand years! Anyway, you have an entire month at your disposal to try it, so if you don't have anything better to do, you can give it a try...

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: