3110 Chromebook MOBO Fried...
I've been repairing Chromebooks for a few years now and I've never seen anything like this... The Motherboard on this Dell 3110 Chromebook had a visible scorch mark on it, and upon lifting up the black cover, capacitors literally crumbled in my fingers. There was also that gray streak (in the 2nd picture) which indicates something definitely burst there, and everything around it was reduced to atoms. Looking at another 3110's MOBO I can see that seems to just have been a capacitor or something, but no clue how it actually blew. Either way this child is getting a new device, I'm just curious if anyone has seen this happen before and has the tools to diagnose it, the most we have over here is enough screwdrivers and bits to open just about anything.
My first thought on this is that it was just a faulty battery, but I would think the motherboard would have something to prevent just the battery itself from doing this much damage. This doesn't look at all like something a student did on purpose, it does remind me of that trend a year or two back where kids would stick something in their USB ports... But that really hasn't been a problem at all this year, and by this point in the year I know which kids would and wouldn't do that, and this isn't that kid. I'm not even sure if I should try taking the screen from this one, I'm assuming pretty much all the parts are toast. Before I got my hands on it, the 6th grader and other adults tried plugging it in and whatever they could do to try to get to turn on, and of course nothing worked.