Upgrading RAM for dell inspiron 1545

[jaredr1999]

I have an old dell inspiron 1545, and i was wondering if i can upgrade the original 2gbs, and put 4gbs or ram. The laptop is supposed to be able to accept it, but i wanted to be sure in case someone else knows something i do not. I use the laptop for school only, and it struggles to run word and firefox at the same time. I watched the ram usage and it uses about 1.80 of the 2.00 gbs it has access to, just on startup without anything running. If you know of any problems with this, or if you have some advice for me, please tell me.

 

[price_th]

If you go to Dell's web site and enter your service tag, you can get the particulars on your system and what it will support. My guess is you have two 1 GB sticks that can be replaced with larger. Issue is the older RAM may be hard to find depending the age of the system.

 

[Math Geek]

i like crucial.com for checking memory upgrades. it will scan the system for you or let you input what your using. it will tell you what you have now, what will run on it and if you wish you can buy it form them as well. even if you don't buy it, it's an easy way to check what you can run on any system. will break down speeds, sizes and such options available to you for that laptop.

give it a shot

 

[wrs1955]

I have an Inspiron 1545, with 4 gb (2 x 2) and it's fine. I'm actually considering going to 8gb (2 x 4). What I've read is that you can do it as long as you are running a 64 bit operating system. (I have Win 7 Pro). The pitfall? it's DDR2 which may be more expensive these days and I understand it can't be transferred into newer machines.

My attitude is that if it's available for a reasonable price, I'll try it. The poor machine is just getting a little too loaded down.

 

[Math Geek]

yah if it is not too high priced, then it may be worth it. win 7 pro came in both 32 and 64 bit version. check the specs to see which one. if it came with 4 gb then it probably is 64 bit but if it came with less then it is probably only 32 bit. right click my computer and select properties and it will pop up your specs to tell you which you have.

partpicker lists 2x4gb ddr2-667 starting at $90. you will more than likely need used stuff to get the price down to where it is worth it since it won't be useful in a new build.

 

[hutson23]

I don't think it's worth it. Around $100 everywhere. And just to throw away the 3 you have.
I just bought a 2 GB stick to get 4gb. $20
T9800 CPU - $30
2 128 GB SSD - $110
Brand New fan and heat sink - $10
USB 3.0 Expansion card $20
Intel 6245 Centrino wireless card. $15
Changing the fan is a major hassle because you must gut the laptop but once you get it done it was not so bad.
Good Luck

 

[juanemc2]

I have an old dell inspiron 1545, and i was wondering if i can upgrade the original 2gbs, and put 4gbs or ram. The laptop is supposed to be able to accept it, but i wanted to be sure in case someone else knows something i do not. I use the laptop for school only, and it struggles to run word and firefox at the same time. I watched the ram usage and it uses about 1.80 of the 2.00 gbs it has access to, just on startup without anything running. If you know of any problems with this, or if you have some advice for me, please tell me.

It uses 1.80 gb of the memory because the rest is used by the video card as video memmory.
Greetings from Argentina!
Juan

 

[Antilope]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop made in 2009 with an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 cpu (it came with a Pentium Dual Core T4200 but I upgraded that for $20 a couple of years ago. An Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 cpu with 6mb cache is now on order for $7.95), 4gb ram and a 160gb hard drive are currently installed. It will accept up to a T9700 or P9900 Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 8gb ram and a 500gb or 1TB sata hard drive. Check Ebay for some really good parts deals as a lot of these computers are being parted out and sold there. This laptop shipped with Windows Vista just as Windows 7 was coming out, so it was upgraded to Windows 7 for free in 2009. It came with 2gb of ram, but an additional 2gb of DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz non-ECC 200-pin ram is currently only $10. Check the Dell website and make sure it has the latest bios installed. Check out YouTube for many upgrade videos. The cpu can be changed in about 15 minutes and ram added in less than 5 minutes.

I recently installed, as dual boot, Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.2, 64-bit. The old computer really flies running Linux. Give it a try. Windows 7 (upgraded to 64-bit) takes 30gb and Linux takes up about 10gb of the little 160gb drive. It has LibreOffice installed in both Windows 7 and Linux Mint (Linux Mint comes with LibreOffice and Firefox browser). I downloaded the Linux Mint ISO and created a bootable USB flash drive from the ISO using Rufus. Don't mess around with a DVD install, a USB flash drive will install Linux in about half the time.

I didn't have to add one driver in Linux. All of the Dell hardware was automatically detected and drivers installed. Wifi is working great on the original internal Dell installed Wifi card.

My wife also has a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop made in 2010 with similar hardware upgrades that I installed. That computer is running Windows 10 x64, and really well. It upgraded without any problems.

So those little old Dell laptops have a lot of life left in them.

 

[Slow Drift]

i like crucial.com for checking memory upgrades. it will scan the system for you or let you input what your using. it will tell you what you have now, what will run on it and if you wish you can buy it form them as well. even if you don't buy it, it's an easy way to check what you can run on any system. will break down speeds, sizes and such options available to you for that laptop.

give it a shot

I put 4gb in my Dell 1545 about 2 weeks ago. Went to Crucial for the scan then bought the appropriate 2gb ram cards (x2) at Amazon- total out was £24 including shipping. Works like a dream. Running Windows 10 without a hitch.

 

[Math Geek]

glad i could help

i've bought from crucial many times and love how easy the site is to figure out what the mobo can handle and scanning for what is currently installed. nice for the novice that may not know how to get the info any other way.

i've found win 10 to be pretty nice even on old systems. i have it running on an old acer aspire one netbook that barely ran win 7 starter (super stripped down versions of win 7) but it runs pretty well on win 10 after the upgrade. at least that part of win 10 was spot on when they said it would be pretty low on resource usage.

 

[jsearls]

2gb max