Windows 11 should soon be faster at extracting files from compressed ZIPs – and it’s about time, frankly

Performance with ZIPs in File Explorer, particularly large ones crammed with files, is getting faster

News By Darren Allan published 21 March 2025

(Image credit: Future)

• Windows 11 has a new preview build that improves performance with ZIPs
• Unzipping now happens faster in File Explorer, particularly with ZIPs crammed with a ton of small files
• Complaints about sluggish performance with unzipping have been around for quite some time, though, and this fix has been a long time coming

Windows 11 has a new preview out and it does some useful – albeit long-awaited – work in terms of accelerating the rate at which files are pulled out of ZIPs within File Explorer, plus there are some handy bug fixes here – and a minor feature that’s been ditched.

All this is happening in Windows 11 preview build 27818 (which is in the Canary channel, the earliest external test build).

As mentioned, one of the more notable changes means you’ll be able to extract files from ZIPs, particularly large ZIP archives, at a quicker pace in File Explorer.

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A ZIP is a collection of files that have been lumped together and compressed so they take up less space on your drive, and unzipping such a file is the process whereby you copy those files out of the ZIP.

File Explorer – which is the name for the app in Windows 11 that allows you to view your folders and files (check here for a more in-depth explanation) – has a built-in ability to deal with such ZIP files, and Microsoft has made this work faster.

Microsoft explains in the blog post for this preview build: “Did some more work to improve the performance of extracting zipped files in File Explorer, particularly where you’re unzipping a large number of small files.”

It’s worth noting that this is a performance boost that only applies to File Explorer’s integrated unzipping powers, and not other file compression tools such as WinRAR or 7-Zip (which, in case you missed it, are now natively supported in Windows 11).

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