Stories by: Campbell Simpson

If you've got an older PC or laptop and need some more storage space for school -- for some movies or music, or if you've just bought a new digital camera or camcorder for class -- an easy way to fix this is to buy an external hard drive. We've listed a couple of reliable models for a variety of machines.

If you've got a heap of digital textbooks or course notes that you want hard copies of, invest in a laser printer. They're extremely cheap and can produce plenty of pages off a single toner cartridge.

So you've bought a new PC or laptop for the school year, but you want more screen real estate. Or maybe your old PC is doing just fine, but you've got to use a larger screen for writing assignments and researching. We've listed a few good monitors you can buy to help out.

If you're going back to school, and you've got a shiny new MP3 player or smartphone filled with music and movies, you'll need some good headphones to go with it. Pick from our list of the best headphones to suit schoolkids and university students.

Hitachi’s G-Drive Mini is aimed at Mac users: its styling takes some cues from the unibody MacBook Pro, and its complement of FireWire 800 alongside USB 2.0 ports suits long-time Mac aficionados. It’ll still work on a Windows computer, of course, and its 7200RPM internal drive speed means it’s able to offer good transfer speeds (although USB 2.0 isn’t fast enough to show it off).

Printing for schoolwork doesn't need to be great quality, but whatever printer you're using has to have plenty of features. Scanning is an important inclusion, as is printing over USB and Wi-Fi.

The Sony NEX-7 has an interesting lineage: it’s the top model in the second generation of Sony’s NEX interchangeable lens camera system, a group of cameras focused on good image quality without the bulky controls and steep learning curve of a digital SLR. The NEX-7 has eschewed the light-on-buttons mentality of the previous NEX-5 and NEX-3 models, though, with three multipurpose control dials and a range of dedicated buttons. We think the controls theoretically make the NEX-7 easier to use in manual mode than older models, but the coming-together of the camera’s interface and hands-on controls needs some more work.

The Panasonic PT-AR100E is a projector aimed at the same market that buys big-screen TVs like the 65in Panasonic VT30A, the 60in Sharp LE835X (and its 70in LE735X counterpart), and the 65in Sony HX925. It’s designed to be used in your living room, whether you’ve got the lights on or not -- with a lamp that’s rated at a bright 2800 lumens, it can handle displaying a movie when your living room is well lit.

The original Seagate Momentus XT impressed us in 2010 with its innovative cache of SLC NAND flash memory: a small 4GB chip that stored a copy of commonly-accessed data and delivered it when needed at speeds much, much faster than the hard drive’s spinning platter could muster. While the rest of the Momentus XT functioned at similar speeds to any other fast laptop hard drive, this crucial flash memory did amazing things like reduce boot times and program loading times to rival the fastest solid-state disks. The new 750GB version of the Momentus XT doubles the size of the flash memory and adds a series of new algorithms to improve boot speed, as well as including another 18 months’ improvements in traditional laptop hard drive technology.

Telstra and HTC teamed up last night to launch the new HTC Velocity, Australia's first 4G smartphone, at Sydney's newest hot-spot restaurant Neild Avenue.