Last weekend I finally came across a genuinely annoying aspect of Windows Vista: its ZIP file support. Like thousands of other web users I found myself needing to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, and the first step of the process requires downloading and extracting a ZIP file.

The file in question isn't particularly large (around 1.2MB), and downloaded in seconds, but then I asked Vista to extract it. To my amazement, it then gave an estimated extraction time of about thirty minutes. Estimated times can be deceiving, of course, so I left it alone for that universal standard measure of time, the time it takes to make a cup of tea. On returning, however, it was still busily churning away.

Being the impatient type I went to the web, downloaded a third party extractor, installed that and unzipped the file (a process that took around ten seconds).

A quick look on the web suggests that this isn't an isolated problem, and that "unblocking" downloaded ZIP files can speed things along somewhat. Failing that, Vista users looking for a zippier unzipper (sorry) should try 7-Zip.