The following are frequently asked questions about .ZIP files.
What is ZIP?
"ZIP" is the most popular of a class a programs that provide multi-file archives and compression capability.
PKZIP is a program that takes many files, collects them and places them
into one file (with a ".ZIP" at the end of the file name) so that only
one file needs to be transferred. Normally, this only saves the hassle of
having to type a lot of file names when restoring the files to another
location. However, PKZIP has a second, very important function. It also
"compresses" the files as it collects them. That is, it uses a sophisticated
algorithm to remove and encode various strings of characters into one or
two bytes. For example, it might take the word Genesis and convert it to
two bytes - rather than the 7 bytes it normally takes to hold the seven
letters in "Genesis" in the computer. By doing this with as many combinations
of characters as it can, PKZIP is able to take textual information and store
it into less space than the original took. For example, the file SERMONS.ZIP
contains 3169 files which represent 22469755 bytes of data into a space of
only 9492439 bytes. This is a savings of over 58%.
When you run the PKUNZIP or Winzip utility, it reads a .ZIP file,
reconstitutes the original files it contains and re-expands them to their
original size at the same time. If you unzip SERMONS.ZIP, for example,
the Winzip utility will read the data encoded within SERMONS.ZIP and build
3169 files which en-masse will consume 22Mbytes of disk space.
Why use ZIPs?
We use the PKZIP utility so that you can download many items in a shorter
period of time than you would have if you tried to download each individual
file in the sermons archive one by one.
How do I get the ZIP utilities?
You can download Winzip from the Winzip website, http://www.winzip.com
After you've downloaded it, use the EXPLORER, FILE-MANAGER, MY-COMPUTER or other windows tool that shows you files and
directories. Usually, when you double click on a file with these tools,
it will execute them if it can. WinZIP (whatever name it was downloaded
as) should self install itself for you and put a WINZIP icon on your
Windows desktop. It also attaches itself to the FILE-MANAGER and other tools
so that later when you double click on a .ZIP file, it will self launch and
allow you to re-expand/extract/unzip that file into it's constituent parts,
much like PKUNZIP for MS-DOS.
What is in the .ZIP file?
What you'll end up when you unzip a .ZIP file are a bunch of little
files that end with .TXT (and/or .DOC). These .TXT files are plain text files
that you should be able to look at by simply double-clicking on them in EXPLORER, or by importing them into any word processor.
The .DOC files are MS-WORD versions of the corresponding .TXT file.
A Warning about these ZIPs
A word of warning. Since the full collection is so large and contains so
many files, it would be in your best interest to create a subdirectory on your
hard drive - perhaps called "sermons" - and change to that directory BEFORE you unzip the .ZIP file(s).
The root directory can only contain 256 entries - including subdirectory names.
Any subdirectory can contain an unlimited number of files.
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