One was a 2010 Macbook Pro with a swollen battery. The battery was pushing against the trackpad which was failing to click. Took the battery out and ran off mains, but still no joy from trackpad. Owner had forgotten the password so then became a bit of a mission resetting password just to get to a login to check the trackpad setting. It looked like one-finger clicking was disabled but then we ran out of time before I could figure out how to navigate to the setting with just the keyboard. A USB mouse would have been a help.
The other was a very recent Acer Chromebook that had been dropped and was supposedly no longer turning on. It turned on fine though. The screen was flickering occasionally but nothing too egregious so I suggested rather than prying the screen off, for which I couldn’t find that much info, but some thing suggested it was glued down, best to keep using it as is and then actually pulling the screen off if it failed completely.
So both laptops went away in usable order, but didn’t really have the satisfaction of a ‘fix’ as such.