Some people’s archiving needs are simple: right-click to extract zips, combine a few files into a zip of their own occasionally, and that’s about it. Nothing that can’t be handled by Explorer on its own.

If you’re, well, a little more demanding, you might be interested in Explzh, a free archive manager for Windows with a host of features you won’t always find elsewhere.

The program handles the basics well, supporting a good range of archive formats – zip, 7z, rar, tar, ace, lzh, arj, cab, iso, img, msi, sfx and more – and giving full access to them from their Explorer right-click menu.

Explzh doesn’t just provide the usual basic “copy the selected files into a zip” function, though. It can exclude files by type, or date. Move the original files to the Recycle Bin, or delete them directly. Check the archive’s integrity, or open it immediately for further processing.

Manage your archives from Explorer’s right-click menu or Explzh’s tabbed interface

It’s a similar story with extraction, where you’re able to define where the files are saved, their layout (folder structure can be preserved, or not), and automate what happens afterwards, maybe moving the archive to some known location after it’s been opened.

The real power of Explzh is only obvious when you open the full application, though. As well as a capable set of standard tools – encrypt/ decrypt, create self-extracting archives – there are options to repair an archive, to scan it for malware (with VirusTotal if you’ve not specified a local engine), to search multiple archives for files, upload it via FTP, and more.

The interface isn’t always ideal, and some of the features are trickier to use than they need to be, but mostly the program does a good job of saving you time. If you regularly download archives containing installers, for example, you’re probably used to extracting their contents, manually finding and launching the relevant program. That’s not necessary here: Explzh has a smart “Run Setup” option which automatically locates and runs whatever looks like a setup program (Install.exe, Setup.exe).

Explzh is a free archive manager for Windows XP and later.