About two weeks ago I posted my first post about working on Chromebooks. As I mentioned before, working on a laptop for the first time can be a little intimidating.

Things all have their specific place that they need to be in for the case to fit back together properly. Additionally, there are lots of little plastic clips that you need to make sure you don't break(though I typically fail).

Once you get familiar with it though, it isn't that big of a deal. In fact, once you have the process down you can probably replace a whole system board in one of these Chromebooks in about 15 minutes. I always start off with my awesome DeWalt cordless screw driver. I usually keep the torque ring set pretty low so that I don't strip out the screws when I am putting them back in.

If you look close at the picture here you will see I have it set to max though, so just ignore that!

This particular Chromebook was brought to me with some kind of deformity in on the touchpad. It wasn't really impacting the usability of the machine, but it was bugging the students and teacher enough that they wanted me to look at it.

You can see the spot in the center of the touch pad in the photo above. I was pretty much at a loss as to what could be causing the problem. It looks like I would have to open it up to see what was going on.

Just a reminder, this is the toolkit I got at my last conference as a parting gift. It is pretty awesome and has all of the parts and pieces I need. It actually looks like Jakemy makes a lot of this type of stuff and it is all readily available on their AliExpress storefront.

After backing out the screws on the back of the case with my cordless screwdriver, I used the pry tool to pop the back off. It is pretty obvious that the touch pad is under the battery, so that is the first thing that needed to be removed. Typically they are held in with two or three screws and then a connector to the motherboard.

I pulled the battery out and this is what I could see from the back of the touch pad. There appeared to be three screws holding it in and then some grounding or antistatic tape that was attached to the metal parts of the case. I wasn't seeing anything from the back that would indicate what might be causing the bulge on the front though.

I half expected to see a screw impaling the circuit board from the back or something like that.

Luckily I had a spare touch pad because they are actually fairly cheap from my parts source. I replaced the that part and then put the battery back in place and reconnected it.

Finally, I replaced the back cover and powered the Chromebook on to test out the new touch pad. It worked flawlessly.

I picked up the old touch pad and started to investigate what might have been causing that lump. I have to admit, I am pretty stumped. It was definitely that small white piece of whatever it is in the middle of the sticky pad.

I can't figure out how it would have gotten there though. The top "sticker" is affixed to the green board in a way that a student wouldn't have been able to peal it up and have it go unnoticed.

Additionally, the adhesive they use is pretty strong. It took quite a bit of effort on my part to get the top "sticker" pulled back as far as I did.

The only thing I can think is that the deformity was always there but no one ever cared about it until now. Either way, I got it taken care of and sent back to the happy customer.

That's all I have for today! I am still waiting for a good broken screen to come in so I can document and show you that process.

I have been an upvoting fool lately so my VP is getting low. If you usually get an upvote from me, give me a little time to recover and I will be back at it, I promise!

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