How strange, I agree if it's not connected to anything and has it's own power supply it could be a weak homing beacon for something, only way to really tell is open another laptop from where he got his one from. How did you come around to discovering this? could you hear it rattle when you shook the laptop?
Nope, it was wedged in pretty tightly. I was adding RAM when I noticed it. It was only ever owned by my friend, but he owned it about 5-6 years ago.
Maybe it was the display model if you he bought it from a shop? It would explain why the others didn't have it. Wrapped in tape, though? That seems important.
Someone thought it would be funny to stick a useless piece of tat in a laptop to freak out some poor sod.
It looks to me like a self powered simplex broadcasting device. In essence a tracking device which has only one way communication. As an ex-work laptop this would be a good indication that it may well be. The only thing that goes against is most RF doesnt have long range, esspecially not on 3volts (voltage of the battery it uses) There is a posbility its a short range simplex tracker used to identify a laptop or other device once its been recovered if it was stolen. Craig
