2. Asus N10Jc

ASUS N10Jc, $649

Thanks to their small, lightweight design, and stylish looks, netbooks are all the rage today. Asus led the netbook way with its Eee PC line, but the company’s N10 family marks an intriguing departure for tech-minded grads. Part of the point in a netbook is to keep power consumption to an absolute minimum in order to prolong battery life. This is why most netbooks today, including the N10, use Intel’s single-core, 1.6 GHz N270 Atom processor. The chip may only be fast enough for productivity and Internet apps, but it also features a maximum power draw of 4 watts, which helps the N10 achieve its five hours and longer battery life during light use.

The N10Jc includes a 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB of DDR2-667 memory, 802.11g WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet, Windows XP, fingerprint scanner, and a 1.3 mega-pixel Webcam. There’s no optical drive, so be willing to load software through USB-attached devices or network connections. The netbook measures 10.9" x 7.7" x 1.5", making it small enough for a small backpack or even a medium-sized purse. (We like that the style is gender-neutral but still attractive.)

One of the N10's best and most unusual features is its switchable graphics. Boot with the system using the GMA 950 graphics core built into Intel’s 945GM chipset, and you’ll get slower performance with longer battery life. Switch to booting with the Nvidia GeForce 9300M GT graphics core, and you not only get much faster graphics performance (albeit at a higher power draw) but you also have support for Nvidia’s CUDA architecture, which can greatly accelerate a growing number of video editors and transcoders.

There are less expensive netbooks to be had, but the N10Jc remains one of our favorites for balancing price, performance, and broad feature selection.