Extracting from ZIP/RAR archives

Extract the contents of the archive

After you have 7Zip or WinRAR installed, you can then extract the contents of the archive you downloaded.

• 
  Go to your computer's Desktop or the drive where you created the Sims3Downloads folder you made before, and downloaded the content file into. Double-click on this folder.
  

• Once inside the folder, you'll see the file(s) you downloaded.
  • 
    Under View button on the Toolbar, change it to Details.
    
  • 
    If you don't see the View button like the one shown, right-click on a blank space in the window.
    

• This makes it much easier to see information on your files as shown in the section on File Types.
  

• You should have one of the columns displaying the file type. See how it says WinRAR archive under Type for the file in the folder? Note the RAR file extension? Because we have a RAR archive, we need to extract the contents of the RAR file.
  • You would do the same thing if you have a ZIP file - WinRAR (or 7Zip) can open both. As a downloader, they will work basically the same for you.
    

• 
  To extract the files,
  1. select the file and right-click
  2. select the archiver program you had downloaded and installed (eg 7-zip in this picture)
  3. click on "Extract Here"
     • If you have WinRar, the "Extract Here" context-menu is not located in a sub-folder; just on the main one
     • You can also double-click on the file to open it and extract it that way. We recommend just using "Extract Here" as it's quite easy.... and you can select multiple files at once to extract all their contents to that folder at once.
       
• You should have at least one more file showing in this folder now, in addition to the archive that was already there.
  1. find the file with the filename in the file format as shown in the expanded content view here
  2. when you've identified the file format,
     • if the extracted file is a .sims3pack
       
       • proceed as usual in installing .sims3pack
     • if the extracted file is a .package
       
       • proceed as usual in installing .package
• You can delete archive files after you have extracted their contents.

Multi-part files

If the item consists of multi-part compressed files,

• after you have downloaded and renamed all the files, as shown here
• right-click on first part and "Extract here"
• you should have at least one more file showing in this folder now, in addition to the archive that was already there.
  1. find the file with the filename in the file format as shown in the expanded content view here
  2. when you've identified the file format,
     • if the extracted file is a .sims3pack
       • proceed as usual in installing .sims3pack
     • if the extracted file is a .package
       • proceed as usual in installing .package
• You can delete archive files after you have extracted their contents.

If you're on OS X

Stuffit Expander is a nifty little program that, once installed, automatically decompresses all kinds of archive files including ZIPs and RARs as you download. You can get Stuffit Expander at its official site (free, but requires registration) or from other download sources such as Versiontracker. If you have any issues with Stuffit Expander, see here for a basic troubleshooting page.

For uncompressing .rar archives, you can also use UnRarX, a simple and efficient freeware tool.

For uncompressing a .zip you don't need additional software since that functionality is already built into OS X. Right-click on the archive and select "Open With" > "Archive Utility". Archive Utility ("BOM Archive Helper" in earlier versions of OS X) lives in <Harddrive>/Applications/Utilities.

You can always search Apple's Disk Utilities directory for other solutions.

If you're having trouble extracting from an archive...

If you don't have the Extract Here option or if the icon for your archive doesn't look like the one shown...

• You probably don't have the tool installed. Make sure you download it and install it before trying to extract from an archive.

If you get an error when trying to extract from the archive, like a CRC error or an error about it being corrupt...

• Try re-downloading the file. Go back to where you got it from originally and download it over again. You'll get errors like that if there was a problem in transferring. Downloading the file again will usually fix the problem.