nArchive

In which delusional discovers an essential Revo utility.

Introduction

Many of you will know about the Revo’s memory, or lack of it! This problem was one of the reasons I was slightly dodgy about purchasing a Revo. However, this program came along and saved me.

nArchive is, well, an archiving application. It allows you to create archive ‘groups’, and add and remove files to the groups. The main interface consists of two list boxes with two buttons between them. One of the boxes contains a list of your uncompressed groups, the other a list of the compressed ones. The two buttons are labeled “Archive” and “Restore”, I guess you can figure what they do.

The main screen. Deceptively simple.

So far so simple

Ah, but there’s one other killer feature. On the tool bar is an “Add Program” button. Click this and you get list of installed apps on your Psion, allowing you to create a group from an installed program. You can archive programs and restore them when you need them. This is especially useful for games, I have about 5 at the moment, and one unarchived.

You can also archive individual files, and these are associated with nArchive. You can then double click them, and nArchive will jump in and uncompress them on the fly. It’ll then rearchive the file when you’ve finished with it. Nice.

A group, showing almost 50% compression

Clever indeed?

As shown by the above screen shot, the compression in nArchive is pretty good, given the right files. Most of my apps compress by around 40%, which is a very good ratio.

So then, a comprehensive utility with an intuitive interface. Not much more to say then. Just to make the point, it’s saved 2064kB, or just over 2MB, of space with all my groups compressed. There you go, just over a 1/4 of my Revo’s memory.

One of the only programs that stays on my Revo all the time, I give it a definite 5.