Just browsed here for several solutions and now I’m posting here for the first time about a laptop hopefully for my specific model. I refurbish and repair PCs to resell locally and on eBay and I just received a nice Dell touch screen laptop. I did the usual, upgrade RAM to 8 GB, install SSD and put in the Windows 8.1 that was licensed to run. Everything runs smooth and very fast. Easy fix, easy sell. Until…it shut off.
At first I thought the battery died or my brain was playing tricks on me. I turned it on again and updated it. Things worked great. I look back at the machine after a while and it’s OFF! At this point I go through the 5 stages of grief and realize I might have to replace the motherboard. Ok, easy no worries since I usually find good deals on eBay except this time there aren’t any. After testing the machine, I noticed something interesting: Most laptops with random power-off issues usually shut down randomly, from 2 minutes to hours. Sometimes it’s obvious things like overheating. This one had me stumped. It would shut down every 30 MINUTES, on the dot! I even used a timer and it did shut down right on the dot. It works absolutely flawlessly until it shuts down. I tried a bunch of things, such as disabling computrace and updating the bios to A12 but no dice.
Hours of research has led me to here. I suspect it’s the Intel Management Engine, since I read that it can cause 30 minute power offs. What steps should I take now? How do I know if this is the problem? I know nothing about flashing externally like I read on here and while I’m open to try new things and further expand my knowledge, I hope there’s a simpler solution to this that doesn’t involve just changing the motherboard.
Chip Specs:
Intel Core i5-4200U 1.60 GHz Socket 1168 BGA (Lol it just off off as I was typing this on the CPU-Z screen. Right at 30 minutes)
Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, EM54T, VT-x, AES, AVX, AVX2, FMA3.
Mainboard Specs:
Model: 0DD2R1
Chipset: Haswell-ULT
Southbridge: H8x/P8x
All straight from CPU-Z. Any help would be highly appreciated! This laptop works so well, it’d really be a shame to have to part it out over this issue.
You need to repair the ME firmware. Make sure you have read/write access to the ME region of the SPI/BIOS chip and then dump the SPI chip image via “fptw64 -d spi.bin”. Then follow [Guide] Clean Dumped Intel Engine (CS)ME/(CS)TXE Regions with Data Initialization and flash the result back via “fptw64 -f outimage.bin” followed by “fptw64 -greset”.
I went to the guide and downloaded the ME analyzer but I’m totally lost on how to use it. There’s no .exe file to run, just .dat files. The readme says to drag and drop files but I don’t know which files to drag/drop and to where. It mentions an executable but I don’t know where it is. Is it through command prompt?
I’m so new to all of this 
Disable your anti-virus for ME Analyzer, it must be removing the exe thinking it’s malicious (false positive). Flash Programming Tool (fpt) can be found at Intel Management Engine: Drivers, Firmware & System Tools > Intel ME System Tools v9.5. It’s a command prompt tool. You can search online to learn how to use command prompt as an administrator. The rest of the instructions can be seen at the guides, I cannot explain those further.
I tried but on github all I see are the .dat file and a .py file. There’s no .exe file to run.