Greasy RAM?

Today I bought a new MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz Black for my girlfriends birthday (sssh, don’t tell her)! I also upgraded the RAM to 2GBs. I did the RAM install myself and as I’ve done this procedure many times I am quite familiar with the process.

Pushing the 2 levers inside the battery compartment for the MacBook released the 2 pre-installed 512MB RAM sticks. I noticed what I thought to be a white powdery substance on the RAM sticks. It turned out to be grease, it just felt like powder at first. I thought that:

A) water had leaked into the MacBook and it was starting to rust
B) thermal paste from the CPU had leaked into the RAM slots
C) someone had dropped the MacBook into powdered sugar

I asked one of our friendly tech staff members and he confirmed it was grease and that it was there because the slots in MacBooks are known to be tight and make it difficult to insert/remove RAM. He said he hadn’t seen it in the Core 2 Duo units though.

The grease is 100% safe and nothing to worry about. After talking with our tech I Google’d up this page which talk about this grease and what it is.

If you see some white grease while upgrading your RAM, don’t worry, it’s completely safe!