Zipeg is a fast and easy-to-use archive viewer with some unusual and interesting features.

The program opens a lengthy list of formats, for instance: ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LHA/LZH, 7z, TAR, GZ, TGZ, BZIP2, CPIO, RPM, ISO, CHM, Z, CBR, CBZ, WAR and EAR. It's based on the powerful 7Zip engine, so you can be sure of great performance, and there are versions available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Any images in your archive will have tiny thumbnails attached. Hover the mouse over a particular file and you'll get a larger thumbnail along with EXIF data, perfect if you need to quickly locate a particular image.

If you regularly handle archives from overseas then you might appreciate the UTF-8, Unicode and codepage support that allows file names to be displayed in their national alphabets.

And there are plenty of small productivity-boosting ideas throughout the application. Zipeg will automatically open nested archives so you don't have to do it manually, for instance, and path completion makes it quick and easy to specify the destination folder when you're unpacking.

What Zipeg won't do is create archives, unfortunately. For that you'll need to use Windows own tools (right-click > Send To > Compressed Folder) or another archiving program.