If your sticking with Dell, look into a docking station for all of the cable connections to the laptop. You can make all the connections to the dock and when you need to go just remove the laptop, no messing with cables everytime you need to disconnect/reconnect. You can hook up a full size keyboard so when you're home you can type a little easier on the bigger keyboard. On the link below just check out the docking brochure. Oh yeah, I am not a spammer.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/prod...=22&l=en&s=dfh