After 5 Years, a new 7-zip final version (15.12) is released

A new version of the popular archive software 7-zip has just been released. This would not necessarily make the news normally but it is the first stable version of the program in a very long time.

7-Zip used to be my go-to program for all things archives years ago but lack of updates forced me to look elsewhere for those needs.

While it worked fine for popular formats such as zip or rar, support for new formats such as rar5 were not added to the program due to the lack of updates.

I found Bandizip after trying out a bunch of archive programs in active development and have not looked back.

7-Zip 15.12 is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit version for the Windows operating system. If you visit the project's Sourceforge page right now you may notice that it is not yet available as a download on it.

Use the following links instead to download 7-Zip 15.12 Stable:

• 7-Zip 15.12 for 32-bit Windows: http://7-zip.org/a/7z1512.exe
• 7-Zip 15.12 for 64-bit Windows: http://7-zip.org/a/7z1512-x64.exe

So what is new in 7-Zip compared to the last stable version 9.20 released five years ago? A lot, here is a short selection of new features and improvements in the new stable version:

• 7-Zip can extract ext2, multi-volume VMDK images, ext3 and ext4 images, solid WIM archives with LZMS compression, UEFI Bios files, zipx (Winzip) that use xz compression, RAR5 archives now.
• Lots of new command line switches, e.g. -bt to show the execution time statistic, -rn to rename files in archive or -h to calculate hash values.
• New progress indicator on Windows 7 or up when the program runs.
• New "move files to archive" option in the 7-Zip File Manager.
• Performance improvements when opening large archives and large folders.
• File Manager can use RAM buffers when opening nested archives instead of using temp files.
• Improved support for long file paths with 260+ characters.

You can check out the official history file on the 7-Zip website for detailed information about the changes. There you find listed all command line options that are new for instance, and also bug fixes of which there are plenty.

To install or upgrade 7-Zip, download the appropriate version of the program to your system and install it. Installed versions of the program will be updated automatically to the newest version in the process.

Now You: Which program are you using to create and extract archives?