Jeffrey McManus

Ever since WinZip began charging for upgrades that don’t add much value to the product, I’ve been looking for an alternative. The good folks at Lifehacker recommended ALZip, which is basically a WinZip clone. I installed it on one of my machines and have been using it for a few weeks; it’s good software. And it’s free (supported by advertising, I guess, which I think you can shut off by upgrading to the $20 paid version).

The only that bothered me about ALZip is what the program does to file icons. The program associates itself with every compressed file format you have (including ZIP, RAR, etc.), which is fine. But the icons themselves are completely over the top — electric blue in color with a giant useless text block indicating the file’s format. I don’t need this — I put important files on my desktop so I can keep track of them while I work, and ZIP files are almost by definition not important enough to be screaming out for my visual attention in this way.

Fortunately, the developer of ALZip wisely lets you set your own preference for file icons. To change this, select the Tools, Preferences menu, select the file type you want to change the icon for, then click on the Change Icons button.

In the box, select %SystemRoot%\system32\zipfldr.dll, which is the DLL used for Windows’ own anemic ZIP functionality. Embedded in that DLL are several icons, including the standard nondescript golden-folder-with-zipper that Windows users are accustomed to.

(That reminds me: “Golden Folder with Zipper” was my nickname in college.)