I'm sorry to have not responded earlier, but I am in no way associated with the program, never have been. I was just interested in repairing one, that was the only reason for my contribution. To answer your question, it's very likely the battery is what's wrong, but I'm not sure if you could find a replacement anymore. Perhaps it will run if plugged in at all times?

Acer would only support 4GB total I believe, but there have been persistent reports of 16GB being possible. You have to remember that every other Acer Chromebook, and all other brands at this time had soldered-on RAM, and, hard drives that could not be upgraded (I believe the C720 had eMMC "SSD", none of the other Chromebooks had SATA. It wasn't until the premium model of the Pixelbook came out in 2017 that another Chromebook had 16GB (the two other models that year had 8GB). The C710 was a very special Chromebook, so its difficult to say if it can fully take advantage of two 8GB RAM for sure.

This is a bit overdramatic, especially now in 2018, when a new Samsung Chromebook 3, with twice the RAM memory is going for $150 at Walmart. Anyone who is already set on opening one of these up, with knowledge that neither the RAM nor disk drive can be upgraded, is already taking a lot of chances on bricking the device. Anyone looking to re-purpose one of these that was distributed to school use is bound to be disappointed. I dare say, giving warnings in red lettering and even shouting in capital letters at someone who is already doing a “teardown” is counterproductive. There is no further danger of physical injury, or additional electrocution hazard which I think capitalized red-lettered warnings should be reserved for. Sorry Josh, I just disagree with your choice here. In fact, I may change it.

Infineon SLB9635 is a dead link. https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-T... is a relevant PDF, Although the information has no use for troubleshooting or repair, anyways. Even in it’s intended purpose, to protect against attacks where the attacker already has physical access and administrative rights (admin passwords) any Trusted Platform Module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Pl... has quite limited utility. Nice attempt to provide complete information, I suppose.

Acer and Crucial insist that 4 GB is maximum ram, but I’ve successfully installed 12 GB and I’ve read reports on the web of 16 GB. It uses the same memory as my 2012 Mac Mini, (my source for the additional RAM) Adding a SSD will make this a powerful machine indeed. The main limitation is that although it will run the (aging) Chrubuntu (an Ubuntu install running on the Chrome kernel), it will not dual boot with linux. The firmware needs to be flashed in order to install a newer linux distro (Gallium OS or a specialized Mint 18), and this will effectively end it’s ability to run Chrome (although I beleive the firmware can be re-flashed so as to return it to Chrome OS .)