Do I need a video card for my laptop?

I have a Dell that is about 3 years old and has decent specs for the age, 4GB memory and 500GB hard drive running windows 7 with intel processor. I plan to upgrade soon and was wondering if I should buy one with a dedicated video card? I do not play games online, but it seems with my current laptop if I am running 3 or more applications I get the HIGH CPU usage warning and it seems it is the virtual memory. A year or so ago it seemed dell and hp would let you upgrade there laptops online and build them up, and now it seems they just factory spec them and ship them with the standard intel video card. Are the newer computers better? or should I keep looking and find one with a dedicated video card for better laptop performance when running multiple applications at once.