Replacement for 8 year old laptop?

I'm currently using a Dell Inspiron 1520 that's 8 years old. The thing is still chugging along fairly well after all these years but I'm looking for a replacement. I have a gift card for Dell and this laptop has been a tank, so I was leaning towards another one of their machines. Mainly will use the system for work and maybe some light gaming (DOTA?, Diablo 3?, Starcraft 2?) nothing extremely demanding as I hope to get a decent desktop within the next couple of years once I land a job.

Here's what I have with the current system:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.20 GHz)

2 Gigs of Ram
Geforce 8600M GT w/ 1 Gig of Memory
15.6 Inch Screen

Here are the two computers that I am mainly looking at:

• Dell Inspiron M531R (~$432)
  AMD Quad-Core A8-5545M
  6GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz (4GBx1 + 2GBx1)
  15.6 Inch Screen
  750 GB Hard Drive
• Dell Inspiron 15R (~$576)
  i5-4200U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.6 GHz)
  6GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600MHz (4GBx1 + 2GBx1)
  500GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
  Intel® HD Graphics 4400

Dell also has a 17 inch laptop w/ an A10 processor but the size and price are just too much for my liking. Anyway I can't find much info on the cheaper laptop outside from a few youtube videos that don't show too much detail. Both of these systems are within my 400-500 dollar price range but I need some insight as to whether they are that big of an upgrade to my current laptop.

Problem with those two laptops is that neither has a gaming video card in them, so games are gonna struggle.

Ya $500 is $100 too short of having a GPU and making it able to play games, at medium/low settings.

Seeing as the second laptop you posted is $576...

You can get a Acer with the following specifications for $549:

• Intel i5 4200U
• 6GB DDR3
• 1TB HDD
• AMD R7 M265 2GB
• 15.6 1366x768 TN
• Window's 8.1

Should play the games you listed just fine on medium settings.

Here's the link... CLICK! :D

Use this as a guide. Notebookcheck has a list of laptop GPUs along with benchmarks for them.

This link is for my laptop's GPU. But, the complete list is on the right. They're ranked according to how powerful they are. The laptop GPUs are in red. You will occasionally see GPUs in black. Those are desktop GPUs included to give a semblance of equivalency.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-660M.71859.0.html

Ah I was on this website earlier but I guess I didn't scroll down far enough to see the FPS. The HD 4400 would be more than enough for my casual gaming considering the only game I really play right now is Warcraft 3 which is ancient. Would this be a significant upgrade over my current machine or is it more-or-less the same? I'm happy with what I have now but this laptop just gets way too hot anymore and I'd really like the HDMI port for my netflix/hulu streams.

HD4XXX series is far enough for anything, I've played Diablo 3 and LoL and other cool games on low settings and all works fine.

I think it's cheaper for you to buy adapter for that HDMI that you really want and get laptop cooler like Thermaltake or CoolerMaster for 20$.

I was in your spot last year. I needed a replacement for my 2007 Toshiba laptop. I decided to buy a gaming laptop purposely designed to dissipate heat efficiently. Every laptop I had owned previously tended to have heat issues with games.

I bought an ASUS 14" G46VW for $799 at Best Buy. That's cheaper than my old Toshiba which cost me $912 when it was brand new. No regrets whatsoever. No heat issues even after several hours with beefy games like Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3. The i5 3230Q is also the beefier type (2.6Ghz, turbo boost to 3.2Ghz).

Personally, If you're still happy with your old laptop, stick with it a bit longer and build up the amount you're willing to spend for its replacement. Once you approach the $800 mark, you have a lot more options.