Category: Geeks r Us
All right. The title says it all. I am having trouble opening a zipped file. So can anyone help me? One of my friends says that all you have to do is press enter on it and a window will pop up and tell me what to do. But everytime, I press enter on it, it makes this forbidding boom and says I can't open it or something. Any thoughts? Thanks.
*sexy*
if you are using windows XP michelle then you need to press your aplications key on the zip file and not the enter key as you were told. from there arrow down to "Extract here" and press enter on that. once the files are extracted you'll find that a new folder has been created, with the same name as the zip file, in the same directory with the unzipped files inside.
hope that helps.
Hmmm no, it shood've worked fine if she just pressed enter.
I think the file is corupt.
You could download winrar from www.winrar.com, which is the best zip program that i have ever seen and try and open it then.
BEN
pressing enter will only work if she already has a specific program for unzipping on the system such as winzip. however as nothing happened when she pressed enter i'll assume that she doesn't. but that doesn't matter because xp comes with it's own unzipper which is what i gave the instruction for.
Actually, you're both incorrect on that one. If the file is a self-extract file, you don't have to have winzip to extract it if you have windows XP; I think windows ME will do this too, but I can't remember right off. Generally, if pressing enter on the file doesn't prompt you to extract the files, then Harp was correct there, you would have to press applications, arrow down to "extract all," then press enter.
However, if the file needs to be moved to a different folder in order to work properly (example,) a set of scripts,) you would select the folder it needed to be moved to, hit "ok," and you should be set.
Juliet, again you are actually not correct as far as that goes. A self extract file is not a .zip file, it is a .exe file so it would be run just like any other application but it's not a .zip file since it already comes with its own unzipping utility. If you press alt-f on the file and z it should open WinZip if WinZip is installed on the machine, but it does sound like the file is corrupt. It may be e.g. if you downloaded it from somewhere that the download did not complete successfully, even if only 0.01% is missing you have a corrupt file that the zip utility cannot extract due to the way the files are compressed. This may be different depending on formats though but I agree that WinRar is the best utility for this.
cheers
-B
thank you B. you made the point that i was going to make. it was specifically stated in the first post that we were talking about .zip files not .exe files.
the mere fact that the pc made an effective boom, translation, critical stop, and said something to the effect that it couldn't be opened suggests that the file is corrupted, rather than lacking an appropriate unzip application. There isn't a lot you can do about this except download a utility which repairs .zip archives. anybody?
Hi.
As default, if you press enter on a .zip file in windows xp, the zip viewer comes up.
If you press enter on a .exe file in that .zip file, xp will ask you if you want to extract it, but it only does this becuase it is a program, and might need other files in the file to run.
If you press enter on a self extracting .zip file, which is actually a .exe, then depending on which program it is made with, you'll get something like "enter the path where you want to extract xxx" or something like that.
I thought atht it was corupt, coz it made the "bong" sound, meaning that the zip file viewer in xp couldn't open it.
Winrar can open a file if only 1 file inside it is corupt, it will give you an error and just won't let you open that file, but you can still do what you want with all the other files.
I am 100% sure that by default on windows xp home sp1/1a/2 and windows xp pro sp1/2
That if you press enter on a .zip file, then the windows xp zip file viewer will open.
If the file is corupt, then try downloading it again.
If it is still corupt, then the file that is hosted is corupt, and its not because the download didn't finish.
BEN.
Thanks all for replying to this. hehehehehehe It turns out that the file I got from my friend was corrupted. I think I'm going to have to redownload it from his FTP and try again. Hopefully, I won't have any further trouble. Is Winzip free? I have XP Pro on my computer so should I bother getting winzip? Thanks again for your help.
*sexy*
you can download an evaluation of winzip from www.winzip.com. though with Windows XP's unzip/zip utility this has become almost unnecessary for those who need not perform advanced compression tasks.