There's nothing terribly bad about WinAce...save, perhaps, the price. It doesn't offer much that can't be had or improved upon by freeware products with the excption of its own proprietary Ace format. Its compression ratios and speed with other formats are nothing special at all (7Zip is faster and has a better compression ratio with ZIP files...tugzip and alzip cover the other formats better than does WinAce and again are faster and offer better compression ratios...all are freeware). Ace format files can be decompressed by other products than WinAce but only Win Ace can compress files in this proprietary format...unless you particularly eed this format for compression purposes I can see no reason to pay for this product.