ExtractNow is a handy little program that needs to get noticed. If you hate having to install software on your computer that you really don;t use often and really don;t want because of the changes that it's going to make to your system then this is the program if for you for extracting files from rar archives quickly.
I really liked this program for it's fast and simple installation. The download from of the installation package was also very small, just 1 megabyte (1MB). It downloads fast and gets to work fast to get the files out of rar files and into a folder where you can use them.
When Microsoft added the zip technology into the windows explorer shell on every desktop, zip archives became the standard for compressing files. Every now and then I need to decompress files from a rar archive and I have always in the past installed WinRAR to do this and never really used the application again to compress anything. This time on a new Windows Vista system I didn't want to install a big program that makes all sorts of file association changes and adds stuff to the explorer context menu and add a ton of keys and strings into the registry. I wanted a simple program to just extract the files from a rar archive file.
A quick search on the web and I found this little gem, ExtractNow. It's small, it does the job I need it to do and nothing more. I'll never compress a rar file when I can easily create a zip from the explorer right-click context menu so i don;t need a feature rich program if I just want to extract files from a RAR archive. WinRAR and others do have many features built into their programs and some included features for backing up file and folders from you computer to other media or network locations. For just extracting files, those big feature rich archival programs too much for me. Addition information and user opinion for using ExtractNow to Extract rar files without WinRAR can be found at this personal site.
