20 things you didn't know your PC could do: even after 20 years of PC World we're still surprised by new and inventive uses for our PCs! To celebrate our milestone birthday this month, we've got 20 ways to teach your old machine some new tricks--from the amazingly practical to the practically amazing.

TURN ON IN LESS THAN 30 SECONDS

Each morning when I get into the office, I hang up my coat, drop my bag in a corner, and start the process of turning on my PC. Five minutes later, I'm ready to work after waiting for the machine to boot, typing in my network password, waiting for plug-ins to load, and finally opening all the applications I use each day. Who needs all that waiting?

Try this little experiment if you'd like to save some time: go to the Start menu and click Shut Down. Choose the Stand By or Suspend option (depending on your version of Windows, it may be in a drop-down list), and click OK if necessary. If you didn't find that option, or if your PC's fans kept whirring, read on.

If the option did work, your PC should quickly return to the state you left it in--with applications open, MP3s playing and everything when you press the power button again. This feature, called Suspend to RAM, saves almost as much power as turning off your computer, by shutting down nearly every PC component and storing the machine's state in system memory.

Not all systems support Suspend to RAM, and some that do support it don't come with the option enabled. To begin with, you need to be running Windows 98 SE, Me, 2000, or XP. If you are and things still don't work as expected, check your machine's hardware support by rebooting and then entering your PC's setup utility. (Watch the screen as the PC boots; it should tell you which key to press.) The labels mentioned below will vary, but they should be typical.

Look for a power-savings or power-management category. Search there for settings related to suspend modes. Enable any setting labelled 'Suspend Mode' or 'ACPI Function'. If you can choose different types of suspend mode (my home PC has a setting called 'ACPI Suspend Type'), select Suspend to RAM by choosing S3 or STR. Save your changes, exit the setup utility, and boot into Windows.

If you're running a pre-XP OS, double-click Power Options in the Control Panel and click the Advanced tab. If possible, select the Stand By option. That should enable Suspend to RAM.

PUT YOU ON THE EVENING NEWS

You won't exactly be making news with your PC, but with a webcam, a green backdrop, and Serious Magic's $US200 Visual Communicator software (www.seriousmagic.com), you can create a convincing imitation of the nightly news. Visual Communicator combines a TV prompter-style interface with a feature called V-Screen that replaces a green backdrop with an image or a video clip in real time. The process, known as chroma-keying, is the same one that puts the weather map behind the forecaster on the evening news.

GET YOU A BEER

Strap a notebook PC to Evolution Robotics' $US350 ER-1 Personal Robot System chassis (www.evolution.com/er1), and you have a toy that can put Sony's robot pet, Aibo, to shame. The ER-1 uses a …