Peter Chamberlin has this advice:

I was formerly a user of WinZip, then switched between several compression programs before settling on WinRAR 3. With a 4Mb dictionary size and support for a wide range of compression formats, plus its faster compression/decompression speeds, it's the main software that I use now for archiving. Although not in use by the majority, I'd say it is something worth considering for those who require greater compression ratios and efficiency. It also covers a good range of languages well.