Laptop help

[Howay 12496]

So I've had my Dell inspiron 1545 for about 5 years now and it's done the job for me with only a few problems (had to replace the charger once and the hard drive once, so not too bad).

Now the charger port (not sure of the technical term) seems to be on the way out as I have to mess about with it until it comes up that it's charging (normally only on a completely flat surface with the wire looped back). I've had a quick look around online and it seems to be a problem with the connection to the motherboard or along those lines, would anyone know if this is somewhat pricey to fix?

 

Like I said I've already fixed a few problems with it and I'll be wanting to get a new one in the near future anyway so basically the second part of this is if it's better to just get a new laptop now anyway.

I used to have an ok knowledge of what was decent specs a few year ago but being honest I'm pretty clueless when it comes to it now. I just really need it for web surfing, word processing and footy manager (which my current laptop is currently rated as half a star of efficiency for running it according to the game).

I've also had a problem recently with running HD streams through my laptop, I live in America at the moment and they have HD streams for the games through NBC but my laptop has a horrific time handling the NBC live HD stream and I end up having to switch to another stream. I don't know if this is a problem with my laptop (old netcard etc) or a problem with NBC as I've not noticed much problems streaming other things such as netflix but other people seem to run NBC fine as a lot of the streams I end up switching too are other peoples NBC streams .

Just wondering if anyone has any tips, like a spec I should be looking at for my intended use, or even any examples of what they reckon would do that job. My main priority is sorting that streaming issue out tbh, as I'd love to be able to watch the HD stream as they tend to just stick Man Utd and co on over here.

Cheers in advance for any help.

Edited February 3, 2014 by Howay