Zipmagic 12.5 for Microsoft Surface Pro/Windows Tablet Storage

ZIPmagic 12.5 is a disk compression software for Windows 8.1 with one-click transparent operation.

Storage capacity has been a frequent concern on the smaller capacity Surface Pro tablets, with Microsoft having clearly documented that the 64GB Surface Pro tablet would only have 29GB of storage space and that the 128GB Surface would only have 89GB. Microsoft built WIMBoot disk compression technology to address this shortfall of storage, which ZIPmagic builds upon with 11 improvements, bringing the technology to the masses while remaining WIMBoot compatible.

Using WIMBoot requires a nearly 5GB download of the Windows ADK, and an external USB thumb drive to create a ‘Windows PE’ bootable disk. This preparation step is eliminated with ZIPmagic 12.5, which is a 19MB download, and runs in a single click on any Windows 8.1 computer. No extra space is required on the disk to compress, and no external storage is required to hold temporary WIMBoot data at any time – it offers one-click, on-the-fly processing of a disk, even if that disk has as little as only 300MB of free space left.

Once running it offers four levels of compression – in contrast to only one available with WIMBoot. It is also capable of recompressing a disk that has been previously compressed, creating extra space as often as needed. Again maximizing storage space, it compresses the entire disk – instead of just the OS – saving space, and achieving compression ratios of 2:1, if not more.

The software also uses all available CPU cores during compression, working as fast as it can to minimize wait times during disk compression. Unlike WIMBoot it compresses BIOS based PCs in addition to UEFI based PCs, supports 32 bit OSs in addition to 64 bit OSs, and even runs on mechanical HDD, in addition to SSD.

In addition to its disk compression it features an archive management suite, supporting 110 archive types including ZIP, and newer compression formats such as ZIPX for JPEGs and 7ZIP for program data. It integrates with Outlook, delivering transparent email attachment compression, as well as previews for archive attachments in received email.