any program recommendations?

More detail required.

I just wanna format my extremely slow running computer, but i got a few gigs of music and even more so in photos that id like to back up to cd before the format. Im thinking of using something like winrar, but i just was curious if there is anything else out there that is extreemely efficient and zipping things up. Or even better somethingt that apams disks (i think is the term used to seperatat the files onto different disks instead of having one obscenely huge zipfile that wont fit onto a cd)

Well.. you might look at

http://www.7-zip.org/

But do consider:

mp3 files and a lot of pictures are already in compressed formats. You won't get them much smaller by using zip/tar/ace/etc and you will use a lot of time waiting for them to compress, especially if you have several gig of data. Think in terms of hours to days of time processing, especially as you note the computer is slow.

Given the comparatively cheap price of blank CD media, my advice would be to simply run it off onto disks as is, without trying to compress it down. This will save you a lot of time and in the end trying to zip it all up might not even save you so much as one blank.

Alternatively, maybe it's time to consider buying a new internal hard disk drive and copying everything across - depends how much money you have to spend.

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