Personally, I'm a fan of , and here's why: It's cute. The program employs cutesy, googly-eyed icons as part of a very novice-friendly interface. Hey, what can I say, I'm a sucker for eye candy.

Thankfully, ALZip packs plenty of power under the hood as well. It supports dozens of compression methods, including ARJ, CAB, RAR, and, of course, Zip. It can split large files, recover lost passwords from zipped files, create self-extracting archives, and even open ISO image files.

In short, it does everything most users could possibly need, and then some. I particularly like its additions to Windows context menus: Right-click a compressed file, for instance, and you get options like Extract to current folder. Simple, right?

I'm not saying ALZip is the best file-compression tool in the world, but it's definitely my favorite. Plus, it's free, unlike WinZip. Give it a try and see if you don't fall in love with its little googly-eyed "mascots."