AppZip

Although disk space availability is less of a concern nowadays, there are still high chances of running low on space to save items on your PC. In this regard, AppZip comes as a tool with which to compress entire programs and only have them decompressed during usage so they’re easier to distribute and store.

The program itself doesn’t come bundled inside a setup package, so you can go ahead and take it for a spin as soon as download is done. Aesthetics are of no concern here, nor is the application fitted with a visual design to make it stand out from the crowd. As simplistic as may be, the main window does manage to display a handful of relevant info to quickly get you up and running.

Input consists of two things, namely the source folder of the program, and the executable to use as reference on launch. Unfortunately, drag and drop is not supported here, so you need to rely on the built-in browse dialog to choose both the general folder, as well as the app executable file.

The core function is to compress all files of an application into a single EXE file to save disk space, and make it more accessible. This only works best with portable applications though. The file is delivered next to the source, and the time it takes to build it mostly depends on the amount of files and space taken up by the target.

Running the created EXE temporarily unpacks entire content and launches the application bound to the input EXE. When closed content is bundled back inside a lightweight package. Make sure all data is saved inside the source, otherwise changes might not make it to the second program launch via this method.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that AppZip doesn’t really save disk space unless used with large programs. However, this means that you need to wait some time to extraction and compression every time you want to use the target program, which can easily become frustrating.