Lenovo Chromebook Issues

[andyt57]

One of my schools has 55 Lenovo Chromebook 100e 2nd Gen MTK. Of these 10 have currently died and will not charge.

 

I'm not impressed and will recommend that they buy Dell Chromebooks to replace them.

 

Has anyone else had problems with this model?

 

Andrew

[Chalkey]

We don't have any experience of this model but Chromebooks appearing to be dead is a common theme with our HP Chromebook 14 G5's. In many cases a battery reset (disconnect and reconnect) resolves this but it does mean opening the case.

[andyt57]

We don't have any experience of this model but Chromebooks appearing to be dead is a common theme with our HP Chromebook 14 G5's. In many cases a battery reset (disconnect and reconnect) resolves this but it does mean opening the case.

 

I've tried that, without any luck. The problem appears to be on the motherboard, and since a replacement motherboard is 2/3 of the cost of a new Chromebook it's just not worth replacing it.

 

Andrew

[Chris_Cook]

We've had some issues with Lenovos, but not usually permanent faults.

 

We do get a lot that seem to crash and not charge until reset. To fix that, you can hold down the reset/refresh key (above the 4 key) and press the power button.

 

The other thing is having the device plugged in when when you press the power button. You can hard-power off devices by doing the reset above, but unplugging the power while you hold both buttons down. This puts it in a similar state to when its new, so the device won't power on without the PSU plugged in.

[PotNoodleTech]

Are they having the red battery led issue? IF not sometimes they can be brought back to life with a hard reset (google chromebook resets for various options)

 

Every single manufacturer has issues - we've had Lenovo Acer HP Dell all of them have things that go wrong.

 

You could move to dell and have exactly the same issues.

 

Don't expect chromebooks to be ultra robust or ultra reliable - they are designed as throw away devices to be junked after 3 years. We're running them for 5 years minimum.

[DavR]

Not with the Lenovo 100e, but, we've had that failure a lot with the Lenovo 300e 2nd Gen MTK - Thread on this here.

 

Having said that, we've had very few failures with a later batch of 300e which are 2nd Gen AMD, so I'm blaming the MTK (Mediatek) chipsets.

[Oaktech]

Across 3 schools I've got 30 ASUS, 60 Samsung, 90 HP and 90 Lenovo Chromebooks.

 

The HP are the least reliable with 1-3 requiring a rebuild each week and frequent freezes requiring battery removal.

 

The most reliable have, shockingly, been the ASUS, I've literally repaired one smashed screen in 3 years. Lenovos suffer from occasional (maybe one a month) battery-out freezes but other than that they've been fine. The Samsung are mainly out in the community so it's difficuly to tell exactly, but I've only had 1 returned faulty and that was fried on an aftermarket charger. These are all Intel based devices.

 

With regards to the Lenovo specifically I've had an issue with my Wife's personal 500e a year or so ago (much marital strife ensued) where it appeared to be completely dead. This was fixed by removal of the battery, leaving for 24 hours. It then powered up successfully on the charger with no battery installed, then shut down, battery reinstalled and allowed to sit on the charger with the lid shut until the charging light went out. It's worked normally ever since.