Upgrades for Dell Inspiron 1545?

Um usually laptop components are soldered to the motherboard, so upgrading things, especially the processor, is very difficult. I would also say that for the price of the upgrade parts you can probably just buy a better system. Consider that.

If you can drop a cpu with a similar wattage then the cooling should be okay but if it's higher try to underclock/undervolt the cpu to help with cooling (and battery life too ) of course that only works if you can get an unlocked cpu

Yes it's certainly possible with laptops to under clock to help with cooling. In fact considering that it is a laptop then it is probably not needing to be very powerful so I suppose I can recommend doing it and taking the performance hit

The Dell Inspiron 1545 can accept up to a Intel Core 2 Duo T9900.

Here is a list of possible cpu upgrades for the Dell Inspiron 1545. I have also included some recent Ebay buy it now prices for used cpu's to give an idea of the current used prices.

Intel Core 2 Duo mobile cpu compatible upgrades for a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop:


Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 3.06-GHz 6M 1066-Mhz CPU 35-watts - $59

Intel Core 2 Duo T9800 2.93-GHz 6M 1066-MHz CPU 35-watts - $30

Intel Core 2 Duo P9700 2.80-GHz 6M 1066-MHz CPU 25-watts - $34

Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 2.80-GHz 6M 1066-MHz CPU 35-watts - $20

Intel Core 2 Duo T9500 2.60-GHz 6M 800-MHz CPU 35-watts - $40

Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 2.53-GHz 6M 1066-MHz CPU 25-watts - $20

Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53 GHz 6M 1066-MHz CPU 25-watts - $11

Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.50-GHz 6M 800-MHz CPU 35-watts - $27

Intel Core 2 Duo P8800 2.66-GHz 3M 1066-Mhz CPU 25-watts - $12

Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53-GHz 3M 1066-MHz CPU 35-watts - $5

I've read about those systems running upgraded CPUs with no issues, the list in the post above is good and bonus for looking up the prices

An SSD drive will make a noticeable speed increase, many causes of old systems feeling slow is the hard drive speed, not just overall speed but as they age they tend to develop sector issues which the OS can get around, but they still slow down the system. A 64 or 128 GB SSD, maybe even a used one if you can test it before purchase, would make the system feel new.

The laptop is not really bad considering the screen size and resolution. I have one and am looking to upgrade it just to see if I can. Most of the parts are cheap, even the processor.

This particular socket is ZIF style, it is upgradeable. Word of caution, it is pin type, not ball nub like some of the older processors were switched to, so don't bend the pins when installing. It says on the manual that it is compatible with Celeron, Celeron Dual-Core, Core 2 Duo and Pentium Dual-Core (no TDP specified).

It also specifies that it is compatible with 4gb modules (for a total of 8GB max). This could be a goof on Dells part, I would verify this by the chipset to see if it recognizes that much. I know it works fine with 2gb modules since it lists as 4gb max memory on the site (I have 3gb total installed from factory).

I have an old Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop with a 320gb hard disk, 4gb ram and a Core 2 Duo T9600 cpu (upgraded from the original Pentium T4200). I bought it in 2009 and it came with Windows Vista. About a month later, Dell sent me a Windows 7 upgrade DVD. I've tried Windows 10 on the old machine recently, but that was a little slow and I have a newer laptop that runs Windows 10 quite well.

I've used Windows since Windows 3.0. About 6 months ago, I became interested in Linux.

So, I decided to dedicate the old Dell to Linux distros exclusively, to test them and see which I preferred. I tried live Linux USB's, but I really wanted to try various distros and compare them on a hard disk install.

I partitioned the hard disk with Gparted and installed 10 Linux distros, all accessible/bootable through grub. I set aside 2 x memory as swap (8.096gb), 25gb for home, and a 25gb partition for each of the 10 Linux distros. There is an additional 14gb partition at the end of the disk that has nothing as of yet.

I found you can only have 4 Primary partitions on an MBR partitioned hard drive, but if you add 3 Primary and 1 extended Partition, you can add quite a number of logical drives within the extended partition that are all bootable. I've read that you can have 15 to 60 partitions reliably on an MBR partitioned hard drive.

Here is the disk partition scheme: (all 64 bit distros - if available). These were installed about a month ago, using the latest distros available at the time.

/sda1 - swap
/sda2 - home
/sda3 - Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.2
/sda4 - extended partition
/sda5 - Ubuntu 15.04
/sda6 - Fedora
/sda7 - Mageia
/sda8 - Chromixium
/sda9 - Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0
/sda10- Kubuntu
/sda11- Neptune
/sda12- PCLinuxOS
/sda13- openSUSE
/sda14- empty

Now it should be really easy to configure, tweak and evaluate each of the Linux distros. Not one of these distros needed help finding drivers. They all supplied all the drivers for my Dell automatically and all of the laptop hardware works.

If I get tired of one of the distros, it should be easy to delete it and install another Linux distro in its place.
After testing all of these Linux distros, I find I like Linux Mint the best. I also like Chromixium because it's a Cromebook clone, saving me having to buy hardware. It's kind of boring, glad I didn't buy Chromebook hardware.

I installed each distro with its defaults from a 64-bit ISO made into a Live USB using Rufus in Windows 10. It's interesting to see how much disc space is taken up initially with each distro.

I initially partitioned the hard disc using a Linux Mint Live USB session, using the Gparted partitioning program that comes with it. Each distro was installed with /root assigned to its own respective partition. All the distros share the same swap partition.

Each of these distros is separately bootable from the Grub boot screen. Each distro installed Grub or added itself to Grub as it was installed.

You can edit Grub easily with the graphical editor Grub Customizer.

Here's how to install Grub Customizer.

Much easier than editing Grub by hand.

This program worked well for me on both MBR and UEFI/GPT hard disks.

You can easily install it in a terminal session.

From the Linux desktop press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open the terminal session.
When it opens, paste these commands below one by one and press Enter after pasting or typing each command:


sudo add-apt-repository ppa: danielrichter2007/grub-customizer

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grub-customizer



Now if you check in Menu, Applications.

Grub Customizer should be there.

Start it up and make any desired changes in boot listings, boot order, even color of menu, and a background picture, etc.

After making all of the desired changes to Grub, make sure to select:

File, Install to MBR

To sum it up, I like having all of these distros immediately available to boot and compare. Switching one out for another doesn't affect the others as they are all on separate partitions. My personal files, downloads, data, etc are saved in the /sda2 partition, so that is also not affected by erasing a distro on another partition and replacing it.

This is really the way to go when you want to compare a lot of Linux distros, or try out the latest thing when it's released. Give it a try. You don't need the latest hardware, either. This is a perfect use for your old hardware.