ZipGenius--Oh NO!

I have read that quite a few people are using the free program called ZipGenius. However, I had a terrible experience with it on Friday night and would like to share to save others the hassle.

I understand that it may work fine in XP (although I won't be testing it), but I had serious issues with it in Vista.

What a night I’ve had and a lot of wasted time to boot!

I installed the program earlier in the week and observed that when I right clicked on a zip file, where previously I could see the Windows link for "extract all" it was replaced with ZipGenius links. Immediately, I was not comfortable with the program invading my Windows settings and changing them.

I uninstalled the program as I couldn’t quickly figure out how to use it.
It also uninstalled the default Windows extraction ability.

So I tried a restore point---at which time my brand new laptop got the blue screen of death and would not start up again!

I called Sony and was able to get it back up and then the claim was escalated to this guy who accessed it by remote trying to figure out how to get the zip to work again and I was on the phone all night until almost midnight.

Finally, we discovered that if we created a new ID, it worked okay.

So now I need to spend time moving over everything to my new ID and setting everything up (like my e-mail and other settings….WHAT a pain….it will probably take me a couple hours to set up the new ID….after all this time now.

And they warned me that it seemed that the program corrupted some of my files and to back up daily as I could get the blue screen of death again….at which point I’ll have to just do a total system restore.

Please learn from my experience.

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I continue to use UnZipThemAll. It is a stand alone program that works on its own and is free. I love that if I have all of my zips in the same folder, both .zip and .rar, that I can direct the program to that folder and it will highlight all of the files for me. All I have to do is click to start and it will unzip all of the multiple zips files at once. Thereafter, the folder will have two files for each (the original zip and the unzipped). It's just a few clicks to sort and highlight all of the zip files together to delete them. So quick and I'm on my way to sorting my files.