I would guess there are many Winrar users here. These are 2 tips that I find very useful, and I hope you will too:
1) Set a compression profile:
Go to Start | Programs | Winrar | Winrar. When the program launches, Options | Settings. Compression tab. Within the “Compression profiles” frame, select “Create default…”. There you can choose the default action when you create archives from the right-click context menu. My favourite is to set Compression Method to Best, and check “Put recovery record”, which I once read to be helpful to recover the files in the event the archive gets corrupted. The latter just adds a little overhead to the task when the compression is done, nothing really noticeable.
2) Create one Rar archive per each file to compress:
It is often the case that you need to compress a bunch of files. On right click, the most immediate option is ‘Add to “[folder name].rar”‘, which creates a single archive containing all the files. However, you might find this inconvenient in two respects: a) you cannot tell at a glance which files are stored unless you open or uncompress the archive; 
in case the archive goes corrupt, unless you can manage to recover it, you are left with nothing. So it would seem much better if one could create one archive per file. Well, that’s possible. Select the whole bunch, righ click on them, select “Add to archive…”. Go to the “Files” tab. Check “Put each file to separate archive”. Click OK. Winrar will do as you expect, and when it’s done the original files are already selected for you to delete. 
