Same here, I've only ever had Dells and two of the three have had side cords, but I can only find one business model right now that has that feature, a Vostro, and I know nothing about them. I don't remember what the first one I had was, the second was an Inspiron (least favorite) and the one that just died was a Latitude and I loved it. I had a 6 cell, and it's 3 years old and my battery life was still 3.5-4 hours.