Become an expert commentator on the competitors at Olympics 2000 by reading up at each sport's international site about the current world champions, best performers and top rankings. As well, get first-hand knowledge of various policy statements and reports, such as EPO drug testing or the use of full-length body swimsuits, from the Olympics Committee or F.I.N.A.

webDotWiz Online now has a special Olympics page that reviews all the sites of the sporting federations accredited by the I.O.C., from archery to weightlifting.

Because track and field events make up such a large portion of an Olympics competition, both ABC Online and the Australian Athletics Foundation are devoting a large amount of time and effort in providing profiles of our athletes.

For other sports, including archery, basketball, hockey and volleyball, visit the webDotWiz Olympics page to link to Australian sporting sites for latest news, team profiles and any upcoming events that individuals or teams are competing in to make final preparations for Sydney.

How fast is your internet connection? Or should we ask, how slow? webDotWiz has been using one particular bandwidth testing page at Computing Central and gathering some results - not very impressive. On the site's speed thermometer, some measurements hardly register! When there are some more figures, results will be published at webDotWiz Online. Readers with an internet connection are invited to collect their own results and post them in to put together a picture of what we have to endure on the world wide wait.

There are now a number of messaging services available to let you know when your friends are online, chat among yourselves or share files. Microsoft's Instant Messenger has been updated to now bring it up to date with these other services. If you have a Hotmail account (and why not - it's free and can save hassles when you change ISPs), Messenger continues its practice of informing you if there's new mail when you go online. If you have a Passport account for your online shopping, Messenger now accepts that email address as a sign in name, as well as any other email account.

The new Messenger expands on its chat feature by allowing voice conversations from PC to PC or PC to phone (calls are free when made from your PC but only possible in the U.S. and Canada at the moment). As well, messages can be left for pagers and mobiles. But perhaps what you'll find most useful is being able to share files with your family and friends while you're chatting online.

Looking for a template to save you time so you can get that report written by tomorrow? Office 97 and 2000 users now have an online resource of a wide range of free templates for download from the Office Update site. They're all categorised, designed by professionals and more are being added.

If you're an Office 2000 user who's moving around using other people's computers but want to be able to use your own Office settings and preferences, there's a "save my settings wizard" available for free download from the Office update site in the Office e-services section.

Want to be a DJ with your own station and broadcast live? The good news is that it's not complicated to set it up. Before looking at setting up a live broadcast, though, remember you can have your own music playing across the Net by using a free service such as MyPlay Winamp. Here it's just a matter of choosing your MP3s, storing them online (up to 3Gb), then making a play list and adding it to MyPlay's listening area for all to enjoy.

For live broadcasts, a good place to learn the necessary steps is the "How to Broadcast" tutoral at Live365.com under the "Broadcast" menu item. You've probably already got the Winamp player for your MP3s and this is the software you use for playing music on your station. With a microphone connected, you can do voiceovers, even host talkshows.

If you decide to use Live365's radio servers, you'll need to sign up (it's free) and by return email you'll get an IP address and port number. You enter this information into Winamp, as described in the tutorial.

Another free tool you might want to look at is PCDJ Broadcaster. You can download it (2.6Mb) from Visiosonics.com. Have a look at the quick start guide and you'll see it's similar to using Winamp at Live365. One of PCDJ's features is that it has two players so you can mix tracks and use waiting lists to fade in each track. The only drawback with PCDJ is that it needs a fairly powerful processor whereas those of us with older machines can configure Winamp to be able to listen to our golden oldies.

The Classic Games Expo was held recently. It's nowhere as big an event as PC Expo but there were some interesting visitors. Billy Mitchell is the first person to play a perfect game of Pac-Man (allowing for some bugs in the game). His score? 3,333,360 points and he didn't miss any fruits or ghosts.

Looking for some free classical music MP3s? Try the Classical MP3 Shop at www.eclassical.com. Look under the site's "Today's Free Works" for free offerings. When webDotWiz visited, Bach's Mass in B-minor was available for download. To register at the site, you only need an email address; sign up for a free webDotWiz mail address to receive their free newsletter.

Keeping with the music theme, a visit to the Experience Music Project is worthwhile. This is the online version of the project's interactive music museum which recently opened in Seattle. The site has three broad areas: explore, create and visit. You can explore the artifact showcase or learn about the artist of the week. If you're feeling creative, try the guitar lick of the day. Unfortunately, to experience the full impact of the site, a fast connection is required but there's still enought to fulfil any visitor's curiousity.