Winrar is the premiere archiver used throughout the newsgroups. While it is not altogether necessary in this day of auto unraring by modern newsreaders, it is still an essential tool for your downloading toolkit.

WinRAR is an archiving and compression program that has become very popular to file traders for its ability to split the archive it creates into many pieces. This is very useful for getting large files because of two reasons. First, you can download several parts now, and several parts later, and basically spread your download out the way you want it. Two, if there is a problem with one part, the solution is to simply get a good copy of that part. This program is what you use to take the archive and restore the original files. It is a critical tool for the file sharer.

This will pop up when you run Winrar for the first time:

1. Un-check the boxes that you already have programs for - for example, un-check the ZIP box if you already are using a program like Winzip for them. Leave the rest checked.

That's it, you are all ready to start using this essential utility!

The easiest way to open an archive is to simply double click the first file of the archive to launch WinRAR. To open an archive once WinRAR has been launched, use WinRAR's Explorer type browser. All you have to do is find the first file of an archive (usually the .part1 or .rar file) and double click it.

1. Move up one folder - Navigate your hard drive using the explorer style interface. This button moves you up one folder to the parent directory.

2. Extract the Archive - Once you have opened the archive, the contents of the WinRAR explorer window will show you the contents of the archive you have opened. Now, simply click the Extract button to begin the decompression.

A window will appear where you can select a folder to extract the archive to. By default it will make a new folder in the folder where the archive is that is the same name as the archive. This is usually very handy so no change is usually necessary, just click OK and away it goes.

If there are any missing or bad files, then you will have to find a way to replace them. If you got them from IRC, go there and try finding someone with the file you need. If you got them from the newsgroups, check out our PAR files section.