So I've been putting this off long enough.  She's trying to cut into my VGChartz time with her Sims 2 obsession.  Of course, that's all just her way of getting ready for Spore in September.  So Is this going to be a good laptop for her?  It doesn't need to do anything other than play sims, spore, and hopefully sims 3 when it is released.

So how future proof is this machine?

The green is her favorite color, but anything'll do.

I'm hoping to spend less than $750-$800.

That will easily run those games mentioned. The 3GB of ram is nice, its a great time to buy a laptop like that as the new generation of Ram and processor is just being realeased, so I say go for it, it all looked pretty good to me.

If possible ask to get it without Vista, you may be able to save your self 50$ and get Xp instead,which would allow your GF to use that RAM a lot more effectivly.

buy it directly from Dell, much cheaper, with free shipping. Give it a try.

Also, get the 3 years warranty for 139, you will need it, much better than buying the Service plan from bestbuy

I wouldn't buy it from best buy. Buy it directly from dell, as kingofwale says.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=DNDWPA3&s=dhs

there... just saved you 50 bucks

I was actually shopping for a laptop just today, and in person the Inspiron build quality feels very... flimsy. There are a lot of complaints about the issue on dell.ca, as well. I wouldn't recommend it. I ended up with an HP Pavilion DV2840SE.

I hate to say it but theres a possibility that it won't be able to handle spore and or the sims 3. I say this because in your link it shows that it has an integrated gpu. I exchanged the laptop i got for christmas (had a 338mb shared integrated gpu) because it couldn't even handle the orange box at the minimum settings. It also failed to run age of empires 3 at a decent framerate.

orangebox min specs

System requirements Minimum:
1.7 GHz processor,
512 MB RAM,
128MB Video card,
20GB available Hard drive space,
DirectX 8 level graphics card,
Windows 2000/XP/Vista,
Internet connection ^[9]

aoe3 minimum specs

System requirements Windows XP, 1.4 GHz Processor that supports Streaming SIMD Extensions, 256 MB RAM, 64 MB video card capable of Hardware TnL, 2 GB free hard disk space (PC)^[2]

the main problem with going away from the integrated gpu to a dedicated gpu is the increased power consumption

skip brings up a good point as well; if you want to stick with the Inspiron, you can actually get a dedicated graphics card in the 14.1" model (I think it's the 1420) for $100. I don't really know how much that will help in the long run either, though.

EDIT:  I know very little about integrated graphics vs. dedicated graphics; if a machine has 1GB of system memory assigned to graphics, is that in no way comparable to a 128MB dedicated graphics card? 

it depends on so many other factor, ie: how fast is the video card processor, so on... that is why you want to get as big ram as you can. so you can dedicate some to your video card in case you need it.

the video card they make you pay is garbage, not worth 100 bucks, I say unless you are a gamer who is looking to use the laptop to play game, don't get it and just buy a console 

This is the laptop I got. It has 4GB of RAM, but has integrated video (up to 1071MB). I'm not planning on using it for games, though. It was $899 CDN.