y Windows 95 ''Start'' menu is filled with handy utility programs that help me make it through each day. Some are free; most are shareware; and some are quite pricey. But most of them are indispensable, and if you don't have them, you should.
HyperSnap-DX Pro 3.1 (http://www.hyperionics.com) is the best program I've found for making screen shots on Windows 95. You can take a picture of the full screen, a specific window, the active window, or a selected piece of the screen. You can set up ''hot keys,'' so that you can control the ''shutter'' with a key combination of your own choosing.
Ever want to grab a single picture of a Web page that was too big for your page?
HyperSnap has a really cool feature called ''autoscroll'' that will scroll down a Windows 95 window while the image is being captured.
Version 3.1 of the program, just released, has some nifty image-editing features as well.
You can crop images, halftone them, and save them in more than 24 file formats, including standards like GIF and JPEG as well as oddballs like SUN Raster format and Encapsulated PostScript. You can set the number of bits per pixel, control image compression, and of course, rotate images. You can get HyperSnap for either Intel or Digital Alpha processors. Not bad for your $25 registration fee.
If you work with images a lot, you might also want to pick up a copy of PolyView 2.9 (http://www. polybytes.com). This program supports more than 31 image file formats. It also has some sophisticated image-processing features that let you control an image's brightness or color, sharpen, blur images, and apply a number of special-effect filters.
PolyView can't compare with Adobe PhotoShop, of course, but what do you expect for a $20 registration fee?
A conversion program that I'm somewhat less excited about is ConversionsPlus 4.0 from DataViz ($99.95). This program recognizes dozens of different file formats for word processors, spreadsheets, and even graphics.
Unfortunately the program struck out when I needed to convert a file from WriteNow 5.0 on the Mac to Microsoft Word on the PC. ConversionsPlus recognized that the file was WriteNow format and displayed some of the text; it just wouldn't convert the data. This is nothing less than an intentional restriction by the program's authors, because DataViz does have another program that will convert WriteNow to Microsoft Word on the Mac.
One thing that ConversionsPlus will do is let you read Mac floppy disks on a Windows 95 box. The company's MacOpener will do much the same thing, and it costs only $59.95.
If you need to convert images to text, you should take a look at Visioneer's newly released ProOCR100. I've been struggling with OCR systems for years, and Visioneer's first entry into this marketplace blows away the competition. I was astonished by the accuracy of the program when scanning everything from faxes to magazine articles. The only time it really screwed up was when words were misspelled, as they were in the company's press kit. Oops.
Unfortunately, ProOCR100 is still a bit of a work in progress. The program doesn't smoothly integrate with Visioneer's PaperPort desktop software. For example: you can export a scanned page to ProOCR100, but if you try to copy a document as text from the desktop, it will get converted with TextBridge OCR, which isn't nearly as good.
Likewise, TextBridge, and not ProOCR100, is still used for searching through your image database. Perhaps Visioneer will get this right the next time around.
Do you use your computer's CD-ROM player to play audio CDs? If so, you should download a copy of Notify's CD Player (http://www.artech.se/ mlt/software). What's really cool about Notify is that it hooks in to the Internet's CD Database, a massive listing of the titles and tracks for more than 100,000 audio CDs.
With Notify and an Internet connection, you just pop your CD into your drive and CDDB does the rest. In a moment your computer will display the title of the album and of each track as it plays. If you want to learn more about CDDB, check http://www. cddb.com. The master server keeps track of things like the most popular discs downloaded in recent weeks: Pink Floyd's ''Dark Side of the Moon'' is number nine.
I've started using Cheyenne Backup ($59.95) once again. Like Iomega's software that I reviewed a few weeks ago, Cheyenne Backup lets you make a ''disaster recovery disk'' for restoring your system after a hard crash.
But unlike Iomega's DittoTools, Cheyenne Backup will work with practically any tape drive you can buy, including those reconditioned DAT drives you can get by mail order.
Unfortunately, the disaster recovery system requires a 16-bit driver. I don't have one for my Symbios Logic 53C416 adapter, so I'm probably going to buy a new Adaptec SCSI interface card. I hope I can find one cheap.
Although Cheyenne Backup is a decent program, the company's technical support is not. Last week I called Computer Associates (which bought Cheyenne a little over a year ago) four times and never did speak with a human being.
Instead, I hung up each time in disgust after sitting on hold for between 15 and 45 minutes. Bill Shuriff, a technical support manager for the company, says they are working on the problem.
Now if I could just figure out some way to organize my Start menu.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
Dow:
