Help with MagSafe port on 2008 white MacBook

[jimmosk]

The magsafe (power) port on my early 2008 13" MacBook (model 4,1) doesn't look right. Can you look at yours and tell me what it's supposed to look like?

Specifically, look at the large rectangular area around the actual pinsockets. On mine I see some grey stuff that covers about a third of a silvery metal surface, At first I thought it was accumulated crud, causing the contact problems I was trying to troubleshoot. But after a little poking at it I realized it wasn't coming off easily... and hey, is that surface *supposed* to be metal? A couple of image searches on google seems to show it ought to be more of a "cruddy" grey color, so maybe in fact that "crud" is actually all that's left of a partly worn-away coating! Maybe my problem is actually that that exposed metal is causing my contact problems?

So I'm not sure what's going on. Should I in fact get that grey stuff out of there? Should I leave it, and find a way to cover up the rest of the silvery metal, like with electricians' tape? Can you look at your MacBook and tell me what the port is supposed to look like?
Any advice is eagerly appreciated!

P.S. The intermittant-power-contact problems have happened with multiple power adapters, so I'm pretty sure it's somewhere on the Mac side, not the adapter side.

 

[logana]

There is a very thin grey/white coating on the metal surface - all that is left of that is the below the 5 Magsafe pins. The exposed metal should not cause any problems since the 5 pins are insulated from the rest of the connector anyway.

It is not that big a job to replace the Magsafe board on the MacBook and would be the best place to start to try and solve your connection issues.

 

[jimmosk]

Thanks for the reassurance, logana! I'll look into swapping out the Magsafe board. I'm a little leery of disassembling the laptop, since I did so poorly with a previous MacBook, but I'll investigate whether this model is more klutz-proof...