So what compressing type you will go? Zip or RAR (including tar.gz) Well personally I will go to Zip. Because even your computer is newly reformat (XP OS) you can extract a zip compressed file. No software needed unlike RAR. But RAR I think compress the file smaller than zip (correct me if im wrong) So where you go RAR or ZIP?
RAR compression is more powerful than zip. From Wikipedia: RAR compression operations are typically much slower than compressing the same data with early compression algorithms like ZIP and gzip, but with a moderately better rate of compression.
From the beginning i always use ZIP only to compress my all files and prefer to get files (articles-templates) from my seller in ZIP format only. To be frank don't know the reason why DON.
Rar is much better, but I still use zip because half the people I deal with don't know what a rar is.
Rar has more compression ratio, It's very popular than .zip, You can see the whole file in rapidshare is in .rar format. .zip and winzip have lost their popularity
RAR RAR RAR... Right thats the lion impression out of the way, I definitely prefer RAR, it has superior compression and compatibility to look inside .pk3's.
With today's hard disk size, I find that's it's no longer necessary to save for just the few hundred kilobytes. I would rather choose zip without requiring other external software.