Dell Inspiron 1545 Laptop

[Navonod]

Anyone here have experience with Dell Inspiron 1545 Laptops? Specifically the Express Card slot. I can't seem to find the "cards" that go into them any where online.
I don't care if it's outdated or anything like that. I just need to know if there is a place to find these cards and maybe buy some.

Edit: Found this video but he just tells me what goes in them. Not where to get them.
Found these finally. Not really what I'm looking for though.

This looks like the most useful thing so far. Key words are "Startech" and "ExpressCard" on Amazon.
Don't you hate it when you ask a question only to find an answer 5-15 minutes later?

 

[FAST6191]

It was outdated before it was new, and a lot of things dropped it about 5 minutes later with even those that remained seeing it limp along as an also ran. That means outside of a few "business" type setups and demands you won't find anything of terribly great interest, save maybe a quasi docking station (probably rare and expensive). I would be surprised if there are any useful vaguely modern wireless cards using it.

You might be able to adapt it back to the older PCMCIA/PC card standard for which there are more items but even then the only reason to go those was business logins (somewhere to swipe your staff ID card), on rare occasions higher bandwidth than USB 2.0 (you could get the odd firewire ports sporting card) and not to clog up a USB port (or indeed provide you a few more USB ports, or card reader if one of those was to be one). A search also reveals a few sata and esata adapters which could be useful if you want to go that route but I have not heard of any of those working for any kind of console hacking purposes for which specific ones might be sought out.

If you are more inclined to go electrical engineer then you might be able to do something marginally interesting on it, or use it as a learning platform for some of the more interesting aspects of computer internals.

 

[Navonod]

Thanks for the info.

I was hoping for something like a graphics card upgrade but something that would fit in the slot was to good to be true. I found that in order to do it you'd need a bunch of cords and hook those up to use a graphics card. I plan on using it for work and some retro gaming. I did end up getting the card to add 2 USB 3.0 slots as it would be more useful for my needs.

I also ordered two 4 gigabyte ram cards, a new battery and a T9900 CPU processor. Maybe I can bring some new life to an old machine before it completely craps out.

 

[E1ite007]

Yeah, ExpressCard or NEWCARD was a standard that tried to capitalize on the popularity of PCMCIA cards but it never could do it. It workerd via the serial standard and was introduced in 2003
There's some adapters for using them on a PCMCIA slot, and it was a tipical expansion card where you could connect ethernet, SATA stuff, NIC connection cards, CAC readers (the ones @FAST6191 says you would use in business companies and stuff) and that thing.
There was actually two form factors of 34 millimeters and 54 millimeters, both wide. One of the main "advantages" of ExpressCard was it needed a lower voltage to work, ranging from 1.5 to 3.3 V.
Afak, the last PC manufacturer to included them in a laptop were Eurocom in 2012, so technically you may found them in eBay like here. According to my experience, the most common ones are USB and Firewire connector cards, and of course PCMCIA adaptors although those are massive.

 

[SAIYAN48]

Express card is good for adding USB 3. If you want to upgrade a GPU, check this out: https://egpu.io/best-egpu-buyers-guide/#expresscard2-interface