Umm... seen this before?

[Medessec]

I was completely disassembling this T30 I had in my boxes since the motherboard was busted, and I discovered this on the bottom underneath the CPU socket...

http://www.medessec.info/m/T30modmaybe.jpg

Has anyone seen/done this before? What's the purpose? I assume this isn't original.

[rkawakami]

Looks like the NSA is / was targeting your computer .

It probably is "original" as stuff like this is typically done because of an ECN (engineering change notice) after the board has been designed but a bug found. That H0022 part is the interface to the ethernet port. Not sure what was tacked on but it looks like it's going across the RX+/RX- and TX+/TX- pins. My guess is that it's some sort of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection.

ref: http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet- ... H0022.html

[Medessec]

Wow... really?

That seems pretty odd to me. It is a pretty good job, compared to some pretty nasty mods I've seen done to D900T video cards and pre-Dell Alienware laptops... I assumed it was just because, *Thinkpad owner*, but your explanation does make some sense.

Seems pretty resource intensive to manufacture a board, then because of a design revision, dump man-hours into microsoldering those wires on numerous boards right after being manufactured... but this was pre-Lenovo. I guess compromise wasn't looked at lightly by the boys at IBM.

[rkawakami]

In my experience things like this has happened before. A board gets designed, built, tested, qualified, certified, approved, released for production and sold to the public. Only after, does someone find a problem that maybe wasn't considered possible / probable up to then. If a simple fix is found that doesn't compromise the functionality of the system, then instead of incurring the cost of re-designing the board and going through the whole build / test / certification process, and more importantly, not having to trash the entire inventory of boards that have already been built, paying a fleet of technicians to spend a few minutes soldering on a part and some wires is relatively cheap.

[DRobinson]

Ah, the infamous orange fly-wired pcba. I have seen these before. As rkawakami said, probably something that was not discovered prior to delivery of some production pcbs. I have worked with EEs who we gave a lot of crap to because their designs always seemed to have orange wires. So much so, that you could pre-load orange wire into to BOM and probably be ok.