For any old timers out there or someone looking for an easy-to-use compression software application I would have to go with WinZip.

I “grew up” with the WinZip interface and I still find it to be one of the easiest compression tools around. With its built in compressed-file manager and extractor and simple GUI it’s a good place to start if you are new to file compression and just want to pack up some files. At under $30 bucks you can’t go wrong with Winzip.

However, there are several other very viable options including:
WinRAR – Complete RAR and ZIP support. Can create self-extracting and multi-volume archives. Optional archive encryption is also available.
StuffIT – StuffIT is available for MAC, Windows, and Linux. Create, manage, browse .zip, .tar, .sit archives.
7-Zip – Creates 7z archives using LZMA compression. Relatively new format that achieves a very high compression ration.

For a complete listing: Compression Utilities