When I ask them why, they always say they had downloaded or received a RAR file at some point, which they didn’t know what to do with until they looked it up and installed WinRAR to extract them. After that, they learned that RAR was better than ZIP for compressing files, causing them to use that instead of ZIP.
I usually respond with 7-Zip is better than WinRAR in terms of compression, while still being able to extract RAR files, which doesn’t always win people over because these are non-technical people that are usually hesitant to install new software unless they actually need to.
None of these people knew each other when they first started using WinRAR, so I think this is actually pretty common.
Edit: with that being said, it probably happens less often now that Windows 11 can natively extract RAR files.
A few people over time have sent me RAR files.
When I ask them why, they always say they had downloaded or received a RAR file at some point, which they didn’t know what to do with until they looked it up and installed WinRAR to extract them. After that, they learned that RAR was better than ZIP for compressing files, causing them to use that instead of ZIP.
I usually respond with 7-Zip is better than WinRAR in terms of compression, while still being able to extract RAR files, which doesn’t always win people over because these are non-technical people that are usually hesitant to install new software unless they actually need to.
None of these people knew each other when they first started using WinRAR, so I think this is actually pretty common.
Edit: with that being said, it probably happens less often now that Windows 11 can natively extract RAR files.