2gb RAM in an iBook G4? observations & questions...

[kwikdeth]

Here's a strange one... this past weekend, I upgraded the hard drive in my friend's 1.33ghz 12" ibook for him... serious procedure, you have to take apart half the damn machine to do it. Anyway, while i was re-assembling the thing, i noticed something interesting... there appears to be a second RAM slot in there!
If you remove the RAM from the top slot, and look at the socket, you can see that there is actually a second slot underneath it. Granted, the metal guides that hold the chip in place only allow for you to access the top slot, but does anyone know if that second, lower slot works? I was thinking, especially since I have a spare 512MB pc2700 chip here, would it be possible to put the 512 in one slot and a 1gb in the other, and with the 512 on the main board, take this machine to 2gb total? does anyone have any info on this additional, unmarked slot?

 

[irishgrizzly]

afaik it's the system memory that's soldered on there. You'd be taking an expensive chance playing with it. I've just put 1GB in my G4 iBook and I've notice a little improvement from the 768 I had in there, but not much.

 

[kwikdeth]

the system memory is soldered onto the motherboard directly underneath the RAM slot, what im talking about is that the riser that comes off of the board that your additional ram plugs into has a second socket underneath the one the memory normally goes into. However, I didnt think to check the height of the motherboard ram which could possibly preclude this possibility.
What machine do you have? this one i worked on is a 1.33, which no longer has the airport card in the same area as the RAM. I suppose it's possible that with the extra space from the relocated airport (which was another mystery... i didnt see an airport card at all inside of the thing, but i did see a broadcom chip on the motherboard... are they soldered on in the 1.33/1.42 machines?) that apple simply decided to save money and use the same memory riser as the powerbooks, but make it so you can't get to the lower slot. After all, that would have made it so there was even less of a difference between the two lines.