USA TODAY

Sony sure got the price right with its new NR Series VAIO laptops, and the folks at Laptop Magazine seem to think the company got quite a bit else right as well, with them bestowing their Editors’ Choice award on the VGN-NR160E model. Winning the laptop the most favors is, of course, its $829 price tag, which buys you a 15.4-inch WXGA display, a 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5,400 rpm SATA hard drive. They were also especially impressed by the laptop’s battery, which lasted 2 hours and 19 minutes in their DVD rundown test and a full 3 hours and 41 minutes during their general productivity test. On the downside, all the “crapware” pre-loaded on the laptop resulted in a drag in performance (removing it boosted the PCMark05 score by 139 points), and they were also somewhat disappointed by the laptop’s lack of 802.11n capability. That only proved to be enough to knock a half a star off the five star rating, however, which would seem to make this laptop a fairly solid bet for anyone looking to keep things under the $1,000 mark.