7zip all the way! I only use winrar when making a cbr file, sometimes when I'm sending a file to dc++ it acts funny (bot says it invalid or something).

Reminds me of pre-rendering pdf files as jpegs so i can read on my tablet quickly... books that are 30Mb with illustrations and lots of text blow up to 300Mb+. One such program which specializes in making gifs, some of the images would be screwed up due to layers in how the PDF was structured, but another free program dealt with it just fine...

But there's always newer version so Sumatra all the time. I'd say, have the Foxit on hand in case you need it, but default to Sumatra otherwise.

It's worth noting that, if you need speed, there are compression algorithms like lzo, lz4 and snappy that you can use. They don't compress as well, but can sometimes compress faster than the CPU is capable of loading data from RAM. (One use case for this fast compression is the Linux kernel's zram module, which creates a compressed ramdisk that can be used as swap space.)

WinRAR... I'm having 90s flashbacks.

Most people? Most people either use 7zip or just get WinRAR without paying....

Just use 7zip.

i used ramdisk once for temp files and browser caches.

that was rather pointless and annoying. corrupted temp files made it impossible to restart until i went into safemode and change the temp directories back. having limited browser cache forced me to clear it more often. and isn't using ramdisk for swapping files considered worse than just letting your RAM work normally?

Which i've used in some tiny VM distros for servers, it was rather cool... of course the server had very low loads so having 64Mb of ram was sorta just workable at the time.

Although for Zram, i'd hope it does quick compression for swapping, then if it's slow and nothing's happening, it goes back and recompresses blocks to make more room, either with just better algorithms, or at higher compression settings. I was really curious why MS never implemented anything like that... between 98 and XP...

In raw speed, yeah probably... but even simple compression on data tends to yield very good compression. If you set 100MB aside for your swap drive, it could hold far more than 100MB, on the other hand it won't hold less than 100MB... so it's sorta free Ram, unless you're under a heavy load. But unless you're doing something like recompiling the Linux kernel, or running a huge server that requires hundreds of megabytes for indexing... then zRAM may work better...

It's a better solution than doing a regular swap device. It's often said, the slowest CPU and memory speed is still faster than the fastest hard drives for sending/retrieving information.

Actually, compiling the Linux kernel doesn't take that long on modern multicore machines. On the other hand, compiling packages like firefox, chromium, and libreoffice takes a long time--on my i5 4670, it takes over a half hour (allowing 3 cores to be used), and that's with /var/tmp/portage being tmpfs. (I run Gentoo on this machine, which is a source-based distribution and therefore every install or update requires recompiling the software. It's bad enough with those 3 packages I mentioned that portage actually has precompiled binary versions of the packages for those with weaker machines (or who just don't want to wait over a half hour for every upgrade of those packages).)

I thought we were going to party like it's 1699.

Don't know if it was already mentioned (skipped to thread end), but an obvious reason for charging for winrar is not for everyday users, but for companies.

I just started adobe pdf, it literally took like half a second to start it up.

Because many users don't use it and they have free alternatives (e.g. 7-zip). Also, some other users pirate it. So it's hard for WinRAR guys to lower the price.

Do you have an adobe background pre-cache-loader that you see sometimes with office programs and others? Maybe if it's cached beforehand...

But i've always seen it run horribly slow.

No, don't have any pre-cache whatsoever.
Maybe it-s because of the ssd ...

Yes, that does seem like a good boost... I've heard it SSD does greatly speed up access for files vs hard drive, so games that take a minute to load on SSD take 10 minutes to load normally (or something like that), multiple files, random access, etc.