Unix is great at giving you power were you need it, but what a pain in the rump when you just want to do such a simple thing like file management. I'm going back to Windows, crashing is frustrating, needing to spend 30 min just to zip a file up is crazy.
What is your question?
EDIT: This should not take 30 minutes:
cd /path/to/parent/directory
find directory | zip <archive_name> -@
Where is the tar question?
General comments are more suited to the Unix Lounge.
There are a large range of file achiving tools available in Unix/Linux all of which will do so more quickly than in windows because they don't have the overhead of opening a GUI.
Please read the rules:
(3) Refrain from idle chatter that does not contribute to the knowledge base.
(8) No BSD vs. Linux vs. Windows or similar threads.