A very short post to just mention that I have experienced, for some time now, major lag whenever I tried to unzip/decompress files using Microsoft Windows’ built-in Extract All… command. Even small zip files (a couple KBs in size) take way too long to extract.

I just wanted to advise anyone else experiencing this issue to get a 3rd party zip applications, such as 7-zip, and the difference in speed is night and day! We’re talking about speed differences of orders of magnitudes.

Now I have no clue as to what is wrong with the built-in command, but there are obvious issues and I’m not the only person having experienced this and I’ve found tons of threads on the matter (sadly no fixes though). It wasn’t always like this, so at some point, some update messed things up.

The Send to -> Compressed (zipped) folder command works just fine for creating zip files, it is strictly the Extract All… command that lags really badly. This is on an i7 PC with plenty of RAM, SSD, no other programs running, all files are local, … so truly an Windows/application issue.

I should also mention that using a 3rd party tools offers other advantages beyond speed when compared to the built-in tool. Most offer more options/parameters for creating zip files such as compression levels, passwords, different formats, file splitting (for large files) …