[geeks] Dell T105 Server, CPU and RAM upgrade

[Nate]

On Mar 19, 2009, at 10:44 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>> It can also cope with the "rar" files that so many Windows-using  
>> folks
>> seem to think that I need to have.
>
> It is a mystery to me why that archive format still even exists.

There was a time when you couldn't create really large ZIP files, both  
in the ZIP file format which had hard limits such as 4.2GB on a number  
of things, and as I recall WinZIP until a few years ago couldn't make  
a ZIP archive bigger than 2GB even on an NTFS file system, and WinZIP  
couldn't segment a ZIP file until after you had created it.  There is  
an emerging ZIP64 format that lifts a lot of the archive limits, but  
it's not widely supported yet (like in the Windows Explorer shell).

WinRAR on the other hand permitted created very large archives a lot  
sooner and also had a much more intelligent segmenter that allowed you  
to segment as you created the archive, supported storing NTFS file  
streams and extended attributes, and could also easily make a self- 
extracting segmented archive and optionally add a parity check file to  
permit verifying archive integrity later.  As you might imagine, the  
RAR format was a much better choice for sharing large archives on  
Windows.

These days I recommend most people just use the open-source 7zip  
program in Windows, which can unrar, unzip, zip, and handle it's own  
7zip format just fine, offers strong encryption in case you need it,  
support for very large file sizes, archive segmenting, and has a  
native 64-bit version (and Explorer shell extension) for 64-bit  
Windows, as well as Linux/BSD/BeOS/Amiga/OS X versions in case you'd  
need them for some reason:

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

- Nate