PA 2023 22.00.08
Long time no seeing. So I start up the new year with a first problem : the virtual driver cannot be installed. Reason : it is missing in the Fast Ring PatchBeam Update Service…
Virtual driver PA 2023-01-28 152607.png
It seems a standard problem with new releases :-)
Can I have a link or can it be fixed. Thank you. CU later

I just tried using PA2017 to create a .pa extreme compression archive of a DSF file.
I left # of threads at Auto Select and it used 1 thread (25% CPU usage)
I cancelled that and created it again, this time manually selecting 4 threads and now it’s using 100% of the CPU.

Hello!

When I use one of the older skins of PA 2018 in the new 2019 version the progress bar looks pretty ugly.
It looks better with the new skins but I prefer the old ones.

Unbenannt 1.jpg

When the function for testing archives is invoked via the shell context menu (PowerArchiver > Test) then all the files in the archive get extracted to the current folder.

The test dialog reports as many errors as there are files in the archive but it fails to give any hint as to which files are supposed to be erroneous or what the nature of the problem might be. Comparing the extracted files to the originals shows no differences at all.

The .7z in question was produced with maximised compression settings in 7zip (taking forever but resulting in smaller archives than .7z produced by PowerArchiver with maximised settings). Therefore I wanted to see whether PowerArchiver can at least test .7z that it produced itself. Hence I had PowerArchiver convert a .pa with the same contents to .7z. There weren’t any errors reported but the resulting .7z contained fewer than half of the files contained in the .pa (137 of 366), so I scratched that test.

Performance is abysmal when testing via the context menu (e.g. almost 2 minutes for testing a .7z that 7zip tests in 4 seconds), but that is most likely due to the fact that the extracted files are written to disk. Testing the same .7z in the PowerArchiver GUI takes only 8 seconds but causes the mysterious appearance of a UAC dialog, as reported elsewhere.

The testing function is vital because PowerArchiver has a history of producing archives that it cannot unpack without errors or that do not conform to the respective file format standards (e.g. ZIP) so that other programs report them as erroneous.

The point of creating archives is that the files in them will most likely have to be extracted at some point. If the extraction cannot be guaranteed to produce correct results then the whole program is absolutely pointless. Actually, worse than pointless - it causes data loss and hence damage.

In PowerArchiver 2023 22.00.06 configuration, the option labelled “Start PowerArchiver 2023 Starter when my computer starts” seems to be redundant.

I am only allowed to change this option when PA Starter is disabled, and then it seems to be ignored.

When I enable PA Starter this option is forced to the enabled state.

I think it’d be good to remove “Start PowerArchiver 2023 Starter when my computer starts” completely. I’ve always found it confusing having both options.

Added later: However i don’t particularly want to use queue but I do like having the PAStarter icon in my tray area.

W10 Pro 22H2 - 64 -bit

PA 22.00.06 (PA 2023)

It has been the case with previous versions of PowerArchiver, but I had hoped that the latest might behave differently. Not so, I’m afraid.

I have, for various obscure reasons, created a few .pa archives, mainly in the hope that they will save me some more space. From time to time, I use the “Test” option to check that important archives are OK and uncorrupted.

With every .pa archive I’ve tested, the process runs through OK but then reports that there are errors. This is always the number of files in the archive e.g. if 11 files, then 11 errors reported.

In the .pa, I can:-

preview the files (usually PDF) extract some or all files and look at or use them convert the .pa to a .zip or .zipx archive, which then works fine and tests without errors

Is it the case that the Test routine isn’t designed for .pa archives, or is there another reason? Although the .pa seems to function properly, despite the test reporting errors, I would like to be sure that every .pa is OK and not “broken”.

Some of the .pas are quite old and produced with earlier PA versions (they are truly “archives”). If I extract all the files in the old .pa, create a new, fresh .pa and add back the files to that, then test the new, no errors (at least in the .pa I’ve tried this on) are reported. This would suggest a mismatch between old .pas and newer versions of PA itself.