Yes I was successful with the pin mod. I used some .03125" SS wire ground to a point and a VEEEERY expensive magnifier setup from work to short it out, God it was small!. But yes the error is with the protected range registers. I'll give what you said a shot today when I get off work. Also if you ever need any machine work done let me know I'll give you a $100 credit for your help

Thanks again man, this worked for flashing it. Now to go to walmart for some taco stuffs while I wait to see if it'll last over 30 minutes now. Booted to the desktop right now so so far so good lol. Thanks again for all your help man, I really appreciate it. Enjoy this virtual beer

So unfortunately the laptop still shut off after 30 minutes. I'm just gonna swap the mobo at this point I'm not sure what else could be causing this problem. I appreciate your help through all this though man

Here are those files you asked for. From what I understand the firmware is still no good correct? Is there a repository where I can just grab the ME firmware for my chip and then reflash the ME with that? Also I am starting to get pretty good at this pinmod lol.

So after grabbing those files for you I've left the laptop running and it's still on. Definitely a good sign I think! I'll see tomorrow when I get up for work if it's still running, if not I will flash those files you provided.

I may be bit late, but in order to get around the 30 minutes shutdown issue, what I do is I have created scheduled tasks "sleep" & "wake" to put the system to sleep after 25 minutes & wake it after 28 minutes/sleep event and set them to run indefinitely, what this does is, sleep resets the ME timeout clock and you will not lose any work due to abrupt shutdown. Hope this helps a little bit in getting the actual problem resolved.