Opening rar files is easy and free. All you need is a software that is designed to do so. Perform the installation once you find and download it, and the program will usually associate itself with all of the rar files inside your system. Some will perform automatic association, but most will require you to do it manually which is as easy as ticking a check box. Once it is associated, you can open any rar file just by double-clicking on it or using the right-click menu in Windows explorer.

Keep in mind that you don't need to purchase any software to open rar files. You don't even have to use a shareware that keeps popping-up a message regularly reminding you to upgrade to the pro version to do it. It is completely free of charge and free of annoying marketing message!

However, before finding out which program you should use, let's find out about what rar is actually. You can skip this boring part, though:)

Rar is just one of the many compressed archives. Just like a zip archive, it can contain one or several files. The reason many people choose this compression format instead of others like zip is it has better compression rate even though the compression and extraction process could take a little bit longer. Furthermore, it supports what is called as redundancy, which makes rar files more resistant to corruption and, in case they still get damaged, they can be recovered. However, how much you can recover a corrupt rar file depends on how bad the damage is.

Other things that many people prefer to use this format is its support on strong password protection and file splitting ability. This splitting feature is pretty useful if you have a giant size file to be uploaded to file sharing sites or sent to your friends online. Instead of uploading or sending a huge size file, which makes it longer either to upload or download it, the file is splitted into several volumes that each has smaller size.

If you often download files from file sharing sites like MegaUpload or Rapidshare, you should have found files that are compressed in rar format and many of the files are splitted into several volumes. The name of the volumes usually in the sequential order like part01.rar, part02.rar, part03.rar.

Top Free Software to Open Rar Archives

Here you come. Below is the list of top free software that able to open and extract rar files beside supporting a large number of other archives such as zip, 7-z, ace, cab, iso, rpm, tar, jar, and so on.

Among any other, 7-zip is probably the most recommended freeware. I've seen a lot of compliments on the features it has. If you compare it with a commercial rar opener, you will likely to find some features that the commercial one doesn't have. Moreover, its 7-z format can be used as a rar alternative since it also has good compression rate. 7-zip works under Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista.

Izarc is a free extractor and archiver armed with loads of features as well like archiver repair tool, archive splitter, converter, encryptor, decryptor, customizable right-click menu, virus scanning, etc.

Tugzip is another one you should try. Lots of features such as ability to perform automatic backup, make a self-extracting archive, virus scanning, and so on.

Universal Extractor is a pure, fast extractor. What makes it awesome is the huge number of compressed formats it supports. I recommend you to take a look at the list of the supported archive formats.

ExtractNow is the one that will make you able to extract multiple rar files from different folders at once.

Now the question is which one you should choose. The answer depends on your preferences, though. If you want to know which one is best for your need, then try these free programs one by one. I myself use Izarc on my computer. How about you? Which one you choose or you think is the best one? Or perhaps you know other similar free applications that are well worth mentioning?

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If you often accidentally press the caps lock during typing like me here, you can completely disable it using Caps Lock Changer. Alternatively, still with the same application, you can make it useful by changing it to other key like underscore, tab, enter, esc, delete, backspace, home, insert, and many other keys. After you apply the changes, it will sit in your tray and run in the background.

Caps Lock Changer is free, works under Windows XP / Vista / 2003 / 2K, and can be downloaded here.

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While it is a good way to reduce the size of your files, sometimes you may find the zip file you've downloaded can't be opened because of some error such as CRC errors. Depending on how bad the damage is, you may be able to recover some of your damaged archives using Object Fix Zip. Like the maker says:

"This software is designed for testing, fixing and processing of corrupt or unusable ZIP archive files that are partially damaged or not completely downloaded"

To save time, it allows you to recover multiple damaged zip files at once. The original archives won't be modified if you choose to save the result of the recovery attempt as new archives.

It is free, can be operated under Windows Vista, XP, 2003, 2000, NT, Me, 98, 95, and can be downloaded from here.

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Some errors on your your PSD and PDD file make your Adobe Photoshop can't open them normally as it used to be. They are corrupted, damaged, broken, whatever you name it. What this program does is trying to use some algorithm to detect the causes and perform a restoration attempt if any fix can be applied. Some of the files may not get recovered 100% but some others may do.

This application claims to support the recovery of:

• the image and the separate layers
• pixels, color depth, dimension, the paletter of the layers and image
• uncompressed and RLE compressed images
• PSD image with depth of 1, 8, 16, 32 bits per channel
• PSD and PDD files on corrupted medias, such as floppy disks, Zip disks, CDROMs, etc
• multiple Photoshop image files
• PSD image with color mode of bitmap, grayscale, indexed, RGB, CMYK, mutlichannel, duotone, lab

You can also perform the recovery process of a PSD file through the right click menu in Windows Explorer if you don't want to do the drag and drop operation every time you want to scan a damaged one. Command line parameters are supported as well. You can read here to find out how this application does the restoration.

Despite of the name, Advanced PSD Repair is free.

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