I have been a Dell customer for over six years now using my Dell Inspiron laptop. I have had very few minor problems with it, mostly due to my own error and so I have been shopping around for a new laptop and decided to go with either the Dell Latitude or a mini. I might go with both since the mini is pretty inexpensive. One of the more important features to me these days is whether or not the laptop I chose is environmentally friendly or not. So I did some research and found...

The Dell Latitude e4300 gets a gold EPEAT rating. It contains no mercury in the LED display, hexavalent chromium, SCC flame retardants and PVC free plastic. The battery is lead, cadmium and mercury free. It's made of 90% reusable/recyclable material. It scores 21/27 GOLD.

The Dell e4300, besides it 19 hour battery charge, comes with AC adapter port so you can plug it into your car or whatever like a cell phone (though you can buy car adapters with three prong for your car so you can plug in anything you want without a special adapter, just thought I should note that). You can take it on a road trip and watch movies the whole time if you want or work...whateva floats your boat. It has a feature called a Dell Latitude ON, where you can connect to your email without having to turn on your entire computer. In a way it's sorta like a sleep mode that accesses only what you need so you don't have to run every operation on your computer to get to it. It's an energy saving design feature.

The security features on this thing are like Mission Impossible. You have to option of using a fingerprint security feature with a smart card. Also with extra services with Dell support, if anything were to happen to your computer; maybe it got stolen or something. You can either have Dell delete your important files or use a remote feature to do it yourself. Plus you can recover your stuff in case of a system hard drive failure without backup.  They can also locate your computer if it get's stolen because it comes with GPS. 

You can also customize any Dell to suit your needs from gaming to digital video editing (which is what I have on my Inspiron which is awesome!). You can customize the color and even find coupons on skins for you Dell. You can get customer service tech. support 24/7 with or without upgrade security service. The warranty on the battery is 3 years but I should note that when calling customer service for tech. support for replacing lost or corrupt drivers cost $$. I had to do it once after my warranty expired and it cost me about $200.00.  It turned out to be a wild tagnet driver that I accidentally trashed when uninstalling...I think it was Music Match. 

The Dell Inspiron Mini 10v starts at @ $299.00 with standard features, wifi, Windows XP Home (does not come with MS word) etc... but $50.00 more you can upgrade to a 160GB hard drive and Anti virus protection. Buying anti-virus software alone cost anywhere from $50.00-$200.00+.

For $50.00 more you can upgrade to a Dell Mini 10 and get a TV tuner and GPS for about $400.00. The Dell Mini 10 comes with Intel Atom Processors, 1 GB memory at least 120GB hard drive, 3 cell lithium ion battery and you can customize the skins. Now when buying a Dell Mini 10 make sure you know the difference between a 10 and 10v. The 10v does not come with GPS or LED or HD and can only be upgraded up to 16GB hard drive. The other difference is the Media card but to be honest I am not sure you can tell the difference. Plus all the fun stuff like WiFi, bluetooth and webcam.

Now I, on review I am seeing that the Dell Mini 9 and 12 are now being redirected to the Mini 10 so I am assuming that the 10 is the 9 and 12 but the 10 is customizable. What I am saying is, the 10 is the the Dell Mini 9 and 12 but are being marketed as the Dell Mini 10 for personalization purposes. Now that is a guess but from looking everywhere it seems this is what happened to the Mini 9. The Dell Mini 9 is the same as the Dell Mini 10v.

The mini 12 has an 80GB hard drive and is a 12.1 inch LED display but is no longer being offered on the Dell site but you can still purchase the Dell Mini 9 and 12 as is on Amazon.