Advice when buying a new laptop

I used to have acer 6530G with AMD Turion X2 with 3650M. The laptop was fine but that AMD CPU was a trouble. Whenever I installed new games, the graphics work fine but the CPU was killing the laptop. I had to wait few weeks so that a patch could released to tweak AMD devices to run games better.

Now since my laptop is dead, I am looking for a new laptop. I am not a hardcore PC gamer (I play it on X360 mostly) but I am looking for a laptop that will have a long lifespan and that can run games fine even on low settings. I want to buy a laptop with with i5-3210M. I now i7 is better but I am on a budget. Is i5-3210M any good? Also what GPU works well with it?

bump

Your asking some very vague questions. Gaming on a laptop is pretty much a bad idea, especially for a self-described hardcore gamer. A person chooses gaming performance or portability...not both.

That being said, we can't really tell you what video card to get, because that may change from brand to brand. Check out Dell, HP, Acer, etc and see what they offer in their models. Being on a budget is going to make it very difficult to get a "gaming" laptop, though, just be aware of that. You'd end up spending a lot less money on a tower.

I am not asking for a laptop that is like Alienware for pro gaming. Something that keeps me entertained when I am far away from home. I have a friend who has Core2Duo with Radeon 4850M (with 3gb RAM) and he was playing games at a steady 30fps for 5 years. The only game he couldn't play is the Crysis 3 due to DX11. I want something that I can play games at 1366*768, no AA, low-mid range graphic quality etc.

Might as well get a laptop with an APU if you don't want to spend money on an actual ''gaming'' laptop.
But you didn't give us a budget so I'll go and assume you can buy a laptop as expensive as it gets in order to do what you want it to do.

Perhaps falcon northwest...