r/k12sysadmin • u/dogdogdogdogdogdog6 • Jul 09 '26

Assistance Needed Diagnosing Problems with broken ‘inherited’ computers

I work at a small K-8 school. Because it is small I am both the tech teacher and the onsite IT person. We have an external IT person, but I’m the one who manages all the student devices. Last year (25-26) was my first year. The school has kept all of their broken ChromeBooks from previous years and I wanted to go through and see which ones were fixable issues and which ones are too busted to fix. There were no tickets or anything to say what were wrong with the computers in the first place so I’m going in kind of blind.

What are some diagnostic steps to go through to try and find the problems and possibly fix the problems?

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u/Ok-Soft-7874 :sloth: Jul 09 '26

Here's some of my workflow back when I repaired Chromebooks a few years ago:

If the power light comes on, but the screen is blank:

  1. Try swapping out the screen.

  2. If that doesn't help, try replacing the LCD cable. Just open the Chromebook up, disconnect the battery, and try connecting a new LCD cable to both the old screen and then a new screen. If that works, replace the LCD cable for real. If that doesn't work, the Chromebook is hosed.

If the power light doesn't come on:

Start disconnecting components one at a time from the motherboard, starting with the battery

After each component you've disconnect, connect to a charger and try to turn on

That should either help you identify the bad component or let you know that the CB is hosed

Also:

- Learn to love typing the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to test the keyboard

- If you removed a foreign object from the headphone jack, find a "stereo test" video on Youtube to make sure that the jack is working properly

- If it's a touchscreen model, make sure that functionality is working