i love 7zip on my PC. I also  use iArchiver for my mac. That's awesome. I personally never liked Winrar.

Well (1) gigabit LAN means (divide by 8) that it maxes at 125 MB/s, 160MB/s exceeds the specifications of a gigabit LAN Even the 1000 vs 1024 bytes wouldn't explain this. Also, usually some overhead reduces this rate. So either something is measured wrong, it isn't a gigabit LAN (or you use multiple streams which I'm not sure routers for home use can do) or it measures the uncompressed data which could be compressed to fit a 1 gigabit stream, though you say you monitored the actual throughput of the LAN itself so that shouldn't be it. I'm puzzled at the moment.

Total Commander ftw ^^

Someone introduced me to Universal Extractor. I love it! It extracts everything, including installers, plus, it outputs to a command prompt, which shoots the nerdiness factor way higher than any other extractor

Ahh.  Well, nevermind that.  If decompressing it is free, why does it matter what format someone else compresses it in?  That just doesn't make any sense at all.

I don't think it really matters anymore.  People who compress either use zip because they can't be bothered to use another format, 7z if they're more technically minded, or gzip/etc if they're linux types.  Rar isn't that common these days (unless it still is in the pirate scene, which I wouldn't know.)