At the risk of breaking forum rules i've tried to obtain Winrar by less
than honerable methods cause sometimes i'm an evil cheap bastard,
but to no success so i'm gonna purchase but wondering if i had to
reinstall since i reformat my hard drive at least twice a month if i
would have any trouble with it's type of registration since it doesn't
seem to be based on a serial number(do not send me cracking advice!)
Reason i ask i've purchase software in past not only Microsoft that has
required me to use online product activation and i'm very picky about
buying compression software since so much is for free,and would not
want to buy twice. (do not send me cracking advice!)

You certainly caught my interest when you say Have to wonder why you must reformat your hard drive so often? I'm pretty sure that Winrar does not have any type of similar product activation. You can certainly just email them and ask.
If it is a big deal why don't you use one of the bizzillion free zip programs?

I really can't fathom why you would want to reformat/reinstall every 2 weeks? It seems to me you should be more concerned with that then on whether winrar has product activation.

the real problem is why you are reformatting so much. I have my pc for about a year a half now w/ a 100gb HDD and I have never reformatted, I just defragmatt and run scandisk at least once every two weeks and it keeps it nice and clean

There's no trouble with registration. You register, and then they mail you a file called rarreg.key that you must add to your WinRAR installation dir. Simple as that.

For safety purposes, keep the file on a floppy disk, or even on Yahoo! briefcase. It's smaller than 1Kb.

Eventually they will send you an updated rarreg.key, usually for the purpose of updating the security model of the keyfile, not that it (the security model) lasts for long anyway.

And I doubt you'll ever have to buy twice. RAR already fully supports RAR (duh) and ZIP, and decompresses most mainstream formats out there (ACE, CAB, ARJ, LZH, Gzip, Bzip2...). Development is fast paced. You should be safe with it.

Besides, it has the great feature of decoding tar.gz/bz2 files in one step, very useful for people that deal with source packages a lot.

Regards;

Roberto.

Edit: And no, I won't bother you asking about your formatting issues. I'd rather focus on the real question in your post. :-P

Thanks for answering the (the) question very much rjamorim,(i love being judged) as far as reformating i think i do have a "tick or sickness" compulsive disorder when it comes to my hard drive.No matter how many reg cleaners and defrags (O&O DEFRAG is groovey)-i still have this need to do fresh installs.Hey,Some people wash their hands 200 times a day.I guess my statement did emply ill gotten gains but hey i've done foggy things,i'll admit but some software companies antipiracy techniques aren't very friendly and geared more towards the soccer mom catalog shopper,anyway you answered my question,
rjamorim,thank you.

Just use 7-Zip.

Compression Test

That was by me. But there really isn't any need to buy winrar when 7z and uha compress better. Unless you have specific reasons to of course.

Well, before you rush to buy WinRAR, which is an awesome archiver, I admit, I wish to give you some food for thought:

IZArc 3.31, freeware, very good, supports every format imaginable, or almost, and can compress to 7ZIP, which is freeware as well, and gives compression ratios very similar to RAR. Heck, even if you buy WinRAR, I would advice you to get IZArc as well!!! (it IS free AND legal after all!) - Do a search on Google to get it, the main page goes very slow for me at least: http://free.top.bg/izsoft/
(It´s more friendly than 7Zip own´s archiver, I think...)

UltimateZip, freeware, also very good, support for a very wide range of formats, and does some nifty things. It just shows a small splash screen on loading, everything else is uncrippled.

BTW, I would encourage you to check out www.pricelessware.org, it is a very nice list of freeware utilities, which has got me to dump a lot of the "foggy" software I used to use...

Maybe try 7-zip! Most often has better compression ratio, its free, it supports most formats. WinRAR you can use in unregistered version only for unpacking

Im rather partial to power archiver 2002 myself. Love the shell integration and it seems to support most formats i run into. Im unaware of the efficiency of its compression techniques. It was one of the first programs i came across that was able to unzip a whole selection of zip files from windows explorer without having to open a new instance of the program for every zip file. Maybe that was just winzip gay-ness.

UnzipThemAll can do it too.

Just like Kblood, I'm a happy user of IZArc, formerly IZip. It can't compress to .rar format but can to 7zip, which is at least as good. And it has support for every kind of file (edit: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BZ2, BZA, CAB, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MIM, PAK, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO), including .rar (read only).

I used to have winrar but not anymore. Now I've decided to use only freewares as often as possible. No more keygen, cracks...

I personnaly would use .rar or 7zip archive files only for my own computer. If I had to send an archive file to someone, I would use .zip format. It's not the best for sure but it is still the most popular. It's always annoying to be asked to send again the same file only because not everyone has the proper compression tool.

Wasn't judging

If I was going to judge then;
Call it what it is; Software theft (not foggy) and I guess you are one that does believe 2 wrongs make a right. There are quite a few free alternatives for most programs so you don't have to support those companies that you don't like for whatever reason or the fact of paying for some software.

I was simply curious why you were reformating so often.
Also I was trying to offer an alternative to registered products since you do not have to re-register them when re-installing them.

There is a free un-raring tool at this page so that you can freely uncompress rar files and then use any of the free compression programs mentioned already to re-compress it. You will also find that most of the free programs (open source) introduce far less regestry keys, files, and miscellaneous crap into your OS than most other programs, ie you can compare foobar to Windows Media Player, try running something like SysInternals NTRegmon to check all the crap added by Windows Media Player and other types of "foggy" software.

IMO, it isn't worth the buy unless registered, it can compress with ACE and such. PAYING to be limited to ZIP and RAR is rather unsatisfying.

From my expierence Rar 3.x beats 7-Zip (with maximal compression, but without special tweaks) quite often. (For example, on 7-Zip's page there is a compression test. Before Rar 3.0 came out, it used regular Calguary Corpus test set. But now, it uses GiMP distribution. Guess why? On binrary files 7-Zip is often better, though) But I like 7-Zip for being free and open.

Rar is also MUCH more widespread. But still, when I sent rar 3.0 files, I discovered that many people do not have software to unpack them So, I send Zip files still, made with 7-Zip, of course .

-Eugene

All they have to do is download the freeware UnRAR (32-bit) utility from the WinRAR website and then import a reg file to install shell support.


And if they wish to remove it:

I don't think I can ask everyone to whom I send an archive file do all this. It's an easy thing to do for sure but IMHO most people don't really like making changes in their register. Some people don't even know what it is.

I can't imagine myself sending an email with a joint .rar file and explain: "OK guys, now you have to download this, and make that to the register...". I think I would do just like eltoder :

Or just send a SFX RAR, that will probably end up being smaller than the zip anyway.

DOS SFX module is 90KB and even Windows Console (that have more problems with portability) is 38KB. For small files this often outweights all Rar savings

And 7-Zip Zip files sometimes end up being even smaller than Rars

-Eugene

The problem with SFX RAR's is that some antivirus scanners see them all as containing a "virus" even if the files are clean, it's due to the RAR developers using UPX. I ran into such a problem last week when F-PROT went mad thinking each and every SFX RAR archive on my system was infected, including the default.sfx module in the WinRAR folder.

This solution was emailed to me from WinRAR support:

You're right!
It was the occassional brain fart that I had by giving unnecessary information.