Total Commander

When copying or moving files, I often use the Queue option (F2). But I would like to queue also an extraction job from an archive exactly the same way. Actually, not only extraction jobs, but also archiving jobs (where I press F5 and enter the archive's name.)

Do you know what I mean? I am missing an F2 Queue button in the dialog window "Unpack files" and "Pack files"

You can still put them in the background (zip, rar, and some plugins). When packing, the main bottleneck is usually the processor, not the disk, so it's not as bad to pack multiple files in parallel as copying multiple in parallel.

Actually, think the opposite. A normal degree of compression is no sweat for current quad core processors (i5, i7). When I am copying large files between two hard drives with just under 30 MB/s the target harddrive cannot possibly handle another stream of data, even if a bit slower (because of extraction from archive).
To write two datastreams on one harddrive simultaneously takes longer than to write them sequentially. Also, I get a bit concerned about file fragmentation when doing that.
And if you imagine a situation where the source and target of both data streams is one and the same physical hard drive, there you have your hard drive as bottle neck.
That's why I would prefer to have just one queue and being able to add archive processing to it as well.

I agree that disk speed for now is much lower than CPU speed for pack/unpack tasks.

I think, that any operation, which could be sent to background should have ability to send them in Queue/

As TC 8 suggestion i suppose add different Queues (named) with different priorities and show more information on current/total progress. Although there may be difficult to show the total progress, because of different type of operation in Queue, so it will be useful to show subtotals, groupet for different operation types (I suppose COPY MOVE DELETE PACK UNPACK operation groups).

It may be dangerous in some ways (i mean some plugins, etc.), but in other ways it will be very useful for creating complex Queues of tasks (paused at creation time and started when needed).