7-Zip Help
 

I feel retarded. ~_~ But for the life of me, I can never figure out how people manage to get 7z files that take 600 or so mb file and turn it into a 100+ whatever mb file. I've tried several options and the compression just doesn't seem to want to work for me. Am I overlooking something or what? x_X Some sort of tutorial would be nice.

Depends on the files, obviously. If you pack roms, changes are you have the European version, the second European version, the Japanese version, 54 hacks and a German release just for Musharraf and Uhrenknecht. Those look alike and will get compressed like they aren't even there.

Just set the compression mode to the highest possible, and start packing.

Don't you know how to compress files with 7-Zip at all or are you just dissatisfied with the resulting compression ratio?

I think he's disappointed with the compression ratio, in which case Grawl is right: set it to the highest compression and let the waiting begin.

Remember it can take a while, like everyone has said just set it to highest, but remeber already compressed files such as .mpeg, .mp3, .avi etc usually will not compress anymore than they have been already, they are compressed formats themselves.

Aaah, okay. Thankya. That explains things. Just a dur de dur moment on my part obviously.

That's because the files are already compressed (albeit using lossy compression). This is where WinRAR holds the largest advantage over 7-Zip. But right now, 7-Zip's author is working on Audio/Picture/Text optimized compression.

Word documents compress like crazy. But then, who the hell compresses docs?

I compress text files. Only the archive, not the files contained within are bound by the rules of the HDD sectors and clusters (such as a 1 byte file being 4KB under Windows XP). Also Ihave over 30MB of them that compress to 4MB, with a 28GB HDD, every byte counts.

I stand corrected.

Also it's important to remember to enable Solid packing. It will find redundacnies between similar files and eliminate them. Without this option, each file will be compressed invidualy and the potential for massive compression will be lost.