Upgrading RAM Dell Inspiron 1764

Thank you for the tip I found a website that showed the compatible RAM for my computer laptop.

Hi @erikveston 

No sadly 16GB ram is not compatible though DDR3 1600 is.

If you could give some feedback that would be great thanks!

I'm looking to upgrade mine as well.. thing is, every memory scanner and website I come across all just say its 8gb is max.  my system came with win7 home... but I'm running win10 pro now and I really want to find out if it will recognize 16gb.  I'm currently running 8gb (2x4gb) ddr3 1333Mhz.  I am trying to find out two things without just spending the $$ to experiment---- 

1) will this laptop recognize and work with 16gb RAM installed (2x8gb)?

2) also, will it work with ddr3 1600?  at the very least, if it wont let me access 16gb, maybe I'll get some faster ram instead.

would love to find out I can do both... get more and get the faster stuff.

Thanks for the reply.  I came across another thread that seems to be dicussing the exact same thing but for a different model : 

https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-Only/Does-Dell-Latitude-E6420-Supports-Over-8GB-of-RAM-in-Practice/td-p/3956751

The official dell take on it is, "8gb is the max" there too but, apparently, people are saying they've installed 16gb and its working fine.  Sooooo... I'm just trying to find out. 

If dell employees have their hands tied and simply cannot inform or recommend it because of some company policy or whatever, thats one thing.  But if there's actually a real software/hardware--'never gonna work'---reason to not to install 16gb, that's another.  

Which one is it?  Also, has anyone in here actually tried installing 16gb in an inspiron 1764 even? 

So, I had to nerd out and search a little for answers.  apparently, its the intel i5 M430 processor that is the culprit(?).  

according to intel's website, they state it only supports 8GB of DDR3 800 or 1066.  **but wait, I'm using 1333 currently (umm, wtf?)

so, already their official numbers are making me wonder.  So, I also noticed they mention the physical address extensions as 36-bit, which, had me curious.  should mean its good up to 64GB of memory (in theory, I thought)... so I had to refresh my memory on that (pun intended).  oh well, still wondering why with a 64bit dual core processor, and 64bit version of win10pro, and PAE tech introduced in the 90's to support up to 64GB of ram,... why they are saying only 8gb.  hehe..  its late and I'm done on this for now.  Here's some pics of things I found interesting while searching for any info.

In case someone stumbles upon this with the same question, I'll share my own experience. I recently got ahold of a pristine 1764 off eBay for very little money, stock 430m CPU, 4 GB of RAM, HDD removed but everything else perfect. The only problem was that it would randomly lock up or crash under stress, which I figured (correctly) was a dust-clogged fan. Cleaned that out and it ran fine.

The system was running fine of two identical 2GB sticks of DDR3-1333, which is supposedly too fast for the memory controller, but it worked fine. However, when I put in a 4GB stick of DDR3-1333 for 6GB, it wouldn't even finish booting an OS. It would get to right before the desktop and then just shut down. Same result with any combination I tried. It could handle 1333, but only in 2+2 configuration.

The only way I could get 8GB to work was to install two sticks of 4+4 that were rated to DDR3-1066 (PC3-8500). When I did that, it worked perfectly. Using it right now, in fact. I don't have any 8GB sticks of DDR3-1066, but I may try later just to see if it can do it. I have a feeling it won't work.

Later on, I replaced the stock CPU with a faster i5-560m, but it made no difference in what it could do in the way of RAM. The 560m works fine, but many others have gone all the way to an i7-640m and been successful, so that's not a surprise. It's currently running that 560m with the 8GB of DDR3-1066, with a cheap commodity SSD installed and Linux as the OS.

I tried 2 8GB sticks and my 1764 wouldn't even boot up.  But 2 4GB sticks work just fine.