The performance of both the Windows and Powershell Zip utilities is abysmal

The following Powershell script enables a Zip operation on approximately 0.33GB of data consisting of around 59,000 files to go from minutes down to less than a minute using 7-Zip instead of Powershells Compress-Archive

Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25288780

Features

• Raise an error if 7zip is missing
• Create a timestamped filename
• Use environment variables to locate common directories for portability
• Skip a folder that should not be included in the resulting zip file using the -xr! syntax
• Display a nice progress GUI with 7zg.exe

7-Zip GUI pops up so you can view the progress