It seems like WinZip has been around since the dawn of PC computing. And indeed, at 21, it's one of the few popular programs still in use to have attained drinking age. And by popular, I mean it recently passed the billion download mark. But the just-launched version 17 shows that you can teach old dogs new tricks, at least when it comes to software. WinZip 17 ($29.95 direct) plays a useful role in this day of cloud computing, social networks, Windows 8, mobile devices, and even graphics hardware acceleration. The program even has a modern, if not futuristic look, with a simple yet functional Office-style button ribbon.

As you may have guessed, it does a heck of a lot more than just zip and unzip files now. And it supports many more archive file formats, which you may run into when downloading on the Web. In addition to ZIP, it can handle TAR, GZIP, CAB, RAR, 7z, ARJ, LZH, BHZ, and many more. It also offers government-level encryption to protect your files, as well as the cloud and social-network integration mentioned. It can also create self-extracting ZIPs so that you're recipient doesn’t need a utility to extract included files.

View All 8 Photos in Gallery

Setup/Signup
WinZip, despite its name, is now available for not only Windows XP through 8, but also for Mac OS X, Android, and iOS. The non-Windows versions, however, don't get the full functionality of the Windows version. You can download WinZip 17 as a free 45-day trial version before you buy. The evaluation version displays a banner ad and dialog asking you to purchase whenever you fire up the program. Installation also adds an Outlook plugin, which actually generated errors when I used Outlook to send emails.

Interface
The new WinZip's main window has the look of recent Microsoft Office interfaces, with a ribbon control bar. You can, however, revert to the classic WinZip interface if you prefer. Either choice is far more useable and attractive than 7Zip's. You can even dress WinZip in themes, but there's no Wizard view as there used to be and like that still offered by WinRAR.

WinZip's first ribbon choice is Create, which offers options for encrypting, resizing photos, watermark, and even converting to PDF. A new button is a cloud with a down-pointing arrow, which lets you create zips from your Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft SkyDrive online storage. (Even though there's a Mac version of WinZip, it doesn't support iCloud file storage.) Of course, those choices required a sign-in to the cloud account. The Copy To ribbon set also offers those three cloud services as targets, too. I'd like to see Box (Free, 4 stars) added, since a lot of businesses use it.

Also like Office apps, at the very top of the app's window are small quick-access buttons, in WinZip's case these are for creating a new zip file, opening one, or—most interestingly—a cloud icon, which sends files to WinZip's ZipSend online storage service. More on this in a bit. WinZip also adds right-click choices to your Windows Explorer windows: You can create or add the selected files to an archive, or zip and e-mail the files. The context menus are also fully configurable, so you can just include the WinZip commands you want.

The remaining menu sets are Share, which lets you create a zip download on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. WinZip's own MyZip cloud storage is also an option here, as is FTP uploading. Backup, which lets you create a compressed Zip of everything in you Documents folder, photos, desktop, email, or favorites. This is a handy tool in a pinch.

Speaking of tools, that's the name of the next activity menu choice. Included are those for creating multi-part zip files, self-extracting ones, UUEncoding (remember those, from Usenet days?), and encrypting with a password. There are also tools for showing the last output messages of test results on the last zip action, a comment adder, and diagnostics. In my tests, the diagnostics and Last Output tools displayed the same dialog.

The final tool is the Performance Scan, which looks for unneeded and temporary files and registry issues, but when you click "Fix" it wants you to by the company's system cleaner software. Stick with CCleaner (Free, 3.5 stars) or SlimWare (Free, 4.5 stars) for this.

Cloud Connections
I was able to easily create zips from files that WinZip downloaded from my cloud accounts, and as with all zip creation in the program, a message box displayed after the operation, telling me how much space had been saved through compression. Likewise I could directly and easily upload a ZIP I'd just created to my cloud account.