Great Laptops and Netbooks for Under $1000

At first glance the Asus N10Jc seems like a do-over of Asus's Eee 1000H 80G XP, albeit with some superior components and design. In fact, it strays very close to ultraportable laptop territory, despite bearing a price ($650) that's inexpensive for an ultraportable but steep for a netbook.

One thing that differentiates this model from rank-and-file netbooks is its inclusion of a discrete graphics processing unit, nVidia's GeForce 9300M GS. Though that GPU isn't the fastest graphics option around, the N10Jc is the first netbook I've tried that lets you toggle between a discrete GPU and the integrated graphics on the motherboard. The new Apple MacBook Pro and a handful of other full-price laptops have similar features, but no competitor in the N10Jc's class does. This setup isn't the same as the hybrid graphics arrangement that nVidia has been advancing (two GPUs working together in Hybrid SLI for improved performance), but being able to choose between high-performance and battery-saving GPUs is still nice.

Though the unit we received came with a six-cell battery, it weighed only 3.5 pounds (the tiny power brick adds another 0.2 pound). Since the N10Jc offers two battery-use modes--a high-performance mode and a power-saving mode--our lab needed to run battery-life tests in each. At the high-performance setting, the N10Jc held out for 3 hours, 40 minutes. In its power-saving mode, the N10Jc stayed true to its word, as the Asus netbook chugged along for a whopping 5 hours, 3 minutes--the best result in its class. Its running time was about 30 minutes longer than that of the nearest competitor, Asus's own Eee 1000H 80G XP.

The N10Jc succeeds in many ways, but its price should prompt you to consider whether you'd be better off avoiding the netbook class altogether in favor of a heavier, all-purpose laptop such the full-featured (as in "with an optical drive") Sony VGN-NR485 for about $150 more.

If you need something slightly more robust than a netbook, see our "Top 10 Ultraportable Laptops" chart.

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