Dear users,

Windows 8 is an upgrade to Windows 7 and PowerArchiver will work great on all of those systems, including Windows XP and all of the server editions as well. We don’t plan to drop support for Windows XP or any other Windows operating systems anytime soon, despite end of life notice from Microsoft. So you can rest assured that ConeXware, Inc. will fully support Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012 and all of the future versions of Windows desktop in all of our PowerArchiver products.

Thank you for your continuous support in the past 15 years!

PowerArchiver Team Members

We want to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Thank you for your continuous support and making us grow even in these times. We had successful 2012 in terms of sales and customer acquisitions and we hope to do even better in the 2013. As you know, we focus more on engineering than marketing and we hope this approach will continue to pay off in 2013, with release of our new products.

We have big plans for 2013, and we will start with new releases within next 2 weeks. So enjoy your holidays and check our website for updates to PowerArchiver 2012, PowerArchiver for Outlook and Zip To Email.

In the next few months we want to expand on our offerings with some brand new products and updates to existing ones to improve functionality and feature set. They are exciting times ahead of us and thank you for all for making it possible.

PowerArchiver Team

Join us in creating next generation format. Lets work together! We are working on next format for PowerArchiver and we need your help – tell us what do YOU want in your compression format: what kind of files you compress the most, what other features you find interesting.

Here we have compiled the list of things we found interesting but please do not limit yourself – if you have some other idea, use this interface to send it to us (click on Give Feedback button at the bottom!) Don’t forget – we love you, lets do this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3sSb_H_JU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtpyOeaGkZk

Hello everyone,

Million dollar question.

• Free for Personal use
• Lacking some features from Standard/Pro
• Full format support
• Full shell extensions
• Make PA more accessible to millions of users
• Still continue to make PA rock for existing users (maybe even more) ;-).

Dear users,

as some of you might know, we are already working on PowerArchiver 12.00 (aka PA 2011). One of the things we are looking at is improving our setup, together with the brand new update that we are already finishing and that will be ready for 12.00 (shhhh, dont tell anyone, but update will be…awesome).

We have been working on PowerArchiver since 1998, and we think that our opinion of what the setup/installer should or should not look like might not be fashionable anymore.

So we have decided to let YOU decide… as you are ones that will be using and (hopefully) paying for it :-).

What we have here is screenshots of new look, modern, Windows 7 like installer and screenshot of good old Windows Installer, as it has been for decade now. Keep in mind that Microsoft has not made any suggestions to what newer installers should look like as we (developers) would prefer, even Microsoft’s own product use different looking installers, which (to myself) makes little sense.

So vote away and let us know which one you preffer. Keep in mind that new look also has penalty of 400kb to the total size of installed package. Personally, i am not sure myself – functionality is completely the same, new one looks fresh while old school is just that, something we have been used to by now. Thanks everyone!

[polldaddy poll=3192515]

Hello boys and girls,

now that holidays are behind us, we can go back and work on PowerArchiver 2010 11.7. Did you really think that this was it for PA 2010? If so, you do not know us well. We have been working on completly revamped web update feature that will introduce much better update system for you, our beloved users.

Old style update from PA 2010

We got the idea when one user told us via email, how much he liked PA but at the same time he also mentioned how constant updates are getting on his nerves. We were baffled, suprised, taken back even. How could someone not like updating PowerArchiver? We always believed that constant improvements made us what we are today. We laughed it off, replied how that is one of our assets and that he can disable updates if he wishes so (politely of course, eastern european way!).

Then I proceeded working on my computer: opened up Calibre to send some books to my PRS-505 and quickly cancelled update check, opened SE manager suite and quickly cancelled update check, turned on VLC and quickly cancelled update check… and I thought to myself – all these updates are quite annoying! Wait a second – could this be what our user was mentioning? Could it be that PowerArchiver is not the center of his universe (like it is to us)? Quite possibly! So i took it as a hint, and went on to time how long it takes PowerArchiver to update on my fast dual core computer and 4 Mbs connection… It took around 65 seconds until PowerArchiver 2010 11.60 was installed and running again (upgrade from PA 2007) and 8 clicks of the mouse. Now thats really not that bad… if you use PowerArchiver on daily basis. If you turn it on every once in a while, and get update screen each time, you might not like it that much. I might be getting old but i also remember how few of our standard forum dwellers also wanted better update system (less clicks).

After indentifying the problem, i went to contact our engineers to see what can be done about it. Answer was completly custom update system that is based on binary diff (bsdiff) and custom set of supporting tools developed from scratch! Since this was also mandatory for our upcoming Super Secret App, we got it greenlighted right away!

PowerArchiver 2010 - New Web Update for 11.70

Here are our design goals (everything is based on user feedback from forums and emails, as always!):

1. Smaller Installations. Our current installer is between 9 and 10 MB. We wanted to decrease update size to under 3 MB if possible. – 3x improvement in size
2. Less interaction. You already have PowerArchiver installed and running. You do not need to interact with properly done update. Target was to lower number of clicks needed to 4. - 2x less interaction.
3. Overall time for update. While 65 seconds is not bad, why not target 30 seconds or less? Lets do it! -2x faster update overall.
4. Better Web Update GUI:
   • Check for updates for all PowerArchiver products at the same time. Currently update checks are done one after other which looks a bit strange.
   • Better display for Whats New info. Text based whats new does not cut it anymore in 2010. Lets link it to our blog page which explains more and has pretty pictures.
   • Install PAOP and PAVD through web update GUI. Don’t have PAOP or PAVD installed and you are registered user? Why not include option to do so from update interface?!
   • More information on latest from PA dot com. We have half a million users check for updates every month, yet only small amount visit our site to see latest happenings and influence development of PowerArchiver. Lets improve that!

I hope you like this upcoming update. There will certainly be an beta release for this version, and quite possibly we will have few other things lined up. Rest assured, you will be informed on these new changes. We are not sure when exactly is this update going to hit the streets, lets hope it will be done during the February 2010. Check screenshot and let us know what you think on forums (currently you cant comment here with your forum account, we are in midst of reorganizing blogs). Once we have the system working (currently it looks pretty and does nothing :P), we will also post benchmarks to see the actual difference in old and new update when updating from latest 11.61 release to 11.70. You can comment it on forums here.

After months of working on first super duper stable PA 2010 release, we think we finally got it. As 11.50 was first official release of our multicore optimized and brand new zip engine with huge number of new features (multicore, lzma, ppmd, unicode, bzip, wav, etc), we knew that 11.6x will be first true super release. It really does take million users to download and install PA in order to find some stranger issues that beta testers did not find

.

Select files and folders in PA 11.61 Backup!

Of course, PA Team would not be PA Team if we stood still – as soon as 11.50 Final was released, we started working on 11.6 release. We knew that once you got hold of it, there will be some reports coming in. While waiting for those reports, we added few extra features, a lot of them requested by you:

• JPEG ZIPX support – we have worked on jpeg support since January 2009. It was not simple thing to do as specs were basically an PDF white paper, but Eugene gave it his best and here we are :-). More info in this blog post.
• Fenster “Dateien/Ordner auswählen” im Backup – you have requested checkbox based select files/folders window for quite a while now, and stars finally got aligned properly. It should be much nicer way to add files/folders to your backup script/pbs!
• SPTD layer for Burner – basically best way to access CD/DVD/BD burner, which assures that there are no access issues with multiple burner software being installed. You need to install latest PAVD drivers through Web update and this option will be automatically selected. More info here.
• No to All option – Yes, finally :-). All overwrite windows now have No to All option. Should be a lot easier now if you need that sort of option.
• Open archive after creation - new shell option, suggested by one of the forum dwellers.


No to All comes to PA 11.61

• Fine tuned Win 7 experience – we managed to fix taskbar progress issue we had, and we fine tuned jumplists for Pro users, so Virtual Drive options would be shown regardless of how many most recently used items you have (expand your jumplist item number to 16 to see all PA jumplist options!). For those that dont know, we have been one of the first apps to add support for Win7 jumplists, taskbar overlays, etc. You can find out more in our blog post from February!
• Win98 support – Some people thought we only care about our coolest users – this is not true! What else can be said about Win98 we got back to PA 2010. It has not been easy, and it has caused a delay to 11.61 release but we recognize that some of our business customers simply have to use Win98 and we felt that we had to provide PA version with our brand new super duper zip/zipx engine for Win98 users as well. So here you go!

There  are numerous other smaller improvements, as well as bug fixes that went into 11.61 release.

You can download 11.61 by clicking here.

Please let us know if you find any issues. Release will go up on all the official pages sometime tomorrow. We expect all translations to be done this week, including at least 2 new ones!

your PA Team.

Hello everyone,

Heads up to all users that use our burner – we have improved burning experience in 11.60 Preview #3 with addition of burning via SPTD layer. It basically lets multiple software use same device without any conflicts (something that ASPI and SPTI methods dont). For some people it should improve their experience, make their burners work better with PowerArchiver and we also observed 20% faster burning speed on our test computers (might different from your experience, all burners are different).

We have tried to make it simple – as SPTD drivers add 2 MB of the installation, and not everyone uses burner (or is Pro user), we incorporated these drivers inside PAVD installation in version 1.03.04 of PAVD (available now). As soon as you install that update, PowerArchiver will automatically use SPTD layer for burning. We have added this automatic selection as option in Config> Misc so you can change it there if you see that you get better results with SPTI (old school), for whatever reason.

Hope you guys and gals like our continuous improvements! ;-)

PowerArchiver 2010 - 11.60 Preview

Version 11.60.08 [August/2009]
New Features
* Support for extracting ZIPX JPEG format, PowerArchiver becomes only
application after WinZip 12 to fully support ZIPX format.

Improvements
* Memory usage improvements – up to 1 MB less memory used.
* Faster explorer view.
* PA uses ZIP as default compression when PA has not been run.
* Spanning now enabled when Queue is used.
* Improved Burner engine.

Bug Fixes
* #1536 – Issue with compressing unicode files in non-english Windows (such as Chinese versions of Windows).
* #1533 – File format selection resets when open dialogue is used to select new filename.
* #1501 – FTP profile selection in backup gets reset.
* #1524 – Issue with 7zip and encrypt filename option.
* #1520 – Spanning is available when PAE encryption is selected.
* #1521 – Update save window does not always default to my documents.
* #1517 – Some Pro options still available when registered as Standard license.
* #1525 – Mount Virtual DVD option not showing up in shell.
* #1507 – Other PA settings not saved if PA is restarted after registration.
* #1513 – Right click menu not showing in backup list.

You can download this release from our download page. Thank you!