Users may notice that extracting archives with extensions such as .RAR, .7z, and .GZ, along with other formats supported by Windows 11, can be significantly slower when using the built‑in tools compared with free third‑party utilities like WinRAR and NanaZIP. This observation comes from testing conducted by an independent publication that compared performance across multiple solutions.
Windows 11 introduced native support for several archive formats in one of its latest test builds. However, during independent evaluation, the built‑in extractor did not keep pace with specialized software.
In a concrete example, the default Windows 11 tool required roughly three times as long as WinRAR to decompress a 24 GB .RAR file. Handling the .7z format proved even more challenging, with the built‑in utility taking around nine minutes to extract a file of the same size. By contrast, WinRAR and NanaZIP completed the task in about one minute.
For the .GZ format, the native Windows tool proved far more efficient, delivering decompression speeds that were nearly on par with WinRAR, both clocking in at roughly one minute for a large archive.
The testing environment for these comparisons featured a modern setup: a Ryzen 5 2600 processor, 32 GB of RAM, an Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card, and a 500 GB Samsung 980 SSD. This configuration was chosen to reflect a typical mid‑ to high‑end desktop used for daily tasks and data handling, ensuring the results would be relevant to a broad user base in North America.
Historically, users who rely on MSI motherboard systems running Windows have faced update hesitancy, which can affect how the operating system handles new features, including native archive support. The broader takeaway is that while Windows 11 adds built‑in capabilities for archive management, third‑party tools often provide faster, more reliable performance for large or complex archives. As one reviewer notes, choosing the right tool can substantially reduce wait times during data extraction and improve overall workflow efficiency. [Attribution: Independent tech publication, testing in North America region]