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WinRAR 5.61 (64-bit)

Posted: September 9th, 2020, 8:42 am
by granretire
I am sorting out a friend's laptop and found the above app on it. I am inclined to remove it as I am sure that she never would have knowingly installed it. Has anyone any knowledge of this app? It appears to back up stuff, but I can't image that she would require this feature as I understand that she only uses the laptop for email and facebook games.
Any guidance?

Re: WinRAR 5.61 (64-bit)

Posted: September 9th, 2020, 8:51 am
by xeny
It's a legitimate compression and decompression tool that you should (although almost no-one does) buy a licence for if used long term.

5.6 was released mid 2018, so it has been installed relatively recently - possibly she received a .rar file she needed to extract?

Presuming she's not bought a licence for it, I'd be inclined to remove it, it is a trivial reinstall if needed.

7zip is freeware, offers similar functionality and can extract rar files -it is my default compression/decompression tool on Windows.

Re: WinRAR 5.61 (64-bit)

Posted: September 9th, 2020, 8:51 am
by SalvorHardin
WinRAR is an archiving program that has been around for a long time (I remember using it on Windows 95). It has its own Wikipedia page (link below).

The RAR format used to be very popular as an alternative to ZIP and 7ZIP. All of these were methods of compressing (and decompressing) large files, making them smaller and thus easier to distribute. It used to be very popular for compressing video files.

I haven't used WinRAR for at least ten years. I guess that the massive expansion in broadband and storage capacity in recent years has made programs like this less relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR

Re: WinRAR 5.61 (64-bit)

Posted: September 9th, 2020, 10:19 am
by granretire
Thank you both for your replies. I will remove it