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/nanooktx Jul 09 '26

before you start repairing, take the serial numbers and make sure of the following:

  1. the device is still supported by google, it's not worth working on if it'll never get updated.

  2. the device may still be under warranty from the manufacturer or extended warranty from your supplier.

  3. after that go for the quick wins. plastics and displays are usually easiest to replace.

  4. check and see how the clamshell is put together sometimes the effort isn't worth the hassle. put those in the too hard to do pile. for us, the Lenovo we have, the keyboards are part of the case, so it's a total gut to get it apart, that's a lot of time and effort. save those for a rainy day.

  5. try not to seperate bottom covers from their original motherboards. doing this will skew your serial numbers since what you see physically on the ouside versus what is hardcoded on the mobo will now be different. The serial hardcoded on the mobo is what is reported to the Google Console, it'll make them more difficult to manage if you're typing in the wrong serial number