Will someone try my file-compression program? It's free! You can even call it from another program, making it easy to incorperate into GUI downloads. Anyway, please try it!
To compress files, simply drag and drop as many as necessary onto the .exe's icon. Decompressing works the same way. The compressed files will have a ".pkt" extension and both the decompressed and compressed files recieve a "(PK)" stamp at the beginning of the filename to allow them to coexist with the originals.
The most remarkable compressions will result from bitmaps. The exceptions are bitmaps of photographic images, since these have more random fluctuations in their byte patterns.
Interestingly, I used the above scenario (calling from another program) to "unpack" a windows program. It originally required the download of about 130MB of graphics files. These were compressed down to about 0.75MB. My uncle downloaded the entire program from a 56K modem in under 2 minutes! This saved several hours of downloading!