If you have a lot of pictures and need to free up some hard drive space, or if you need to shrink giant, photo-laden e-mail messages, WinZip 12 is a tempting way to make it happen. If you don't, it's still a handy program to have around.

ShrinkMyTunes is a nice idea, but we do have doubts about the drop in quality of the sound. Having said that, ShrinkMyTunes does offer a full 14-day money back guarantee, so it's worth having a go to see whether you find the results acceptable or not -- after all, you could save yourself the cost of a new hard drive or iPod.

WinRAR comes in handy when trying to open .rar files but isn’t recommended as our compression program of choice.