Good day to you all, my fellow hardware repair enthusiasts. I have stumbled upon a very annoying issue with my notebook and I am wondering if somebody could provide me with much needed help.
Yesterday my GL702VM started to hibernate randomly without any apparent reasons. Before hibernation a default Windows “Locking” screen with a progress indicator spinner appears for half a second. After that it won’t start properly and it will turn off immediately after turning on (it turns on, I can hear the HDD and fans starting to spin and then it immediately turns off, the whole process takes less then a second). By fiddling around with it I found out the following:
The notebook can power back on properly and boot to Windows if I leave the notebook powered off for a lengthy period of time (couple of hours), but after an hour or two the issue comes back unchanged. Could this be the indication, that the problem is caused by overheating and not the sensor?
I managed to start the notebook and boot to Windows by pressing the power button and then immediately closing the lid until it boots. Then, after opening the lid I can log in and use the notebook for 20-30 minutes, before it hibernates again. I am currently conducting a test to see, if the issue persists if I leave it running with closed lid and “Lid close action” set to ‘nothing’ on both plugged in and battery. So far it has been running for more then two hours without hibernating.
Weirdly, it seems to ignore the power settings for when the lid is closed, as this behavior persist even when “Lid close action” is set to ‘nothing’ on both battery and plugged in. Probable indication that it could be something else other than lid sensor or is there a possibility, that the sensor somehow overrides the default Windows functionality? Also, the screen turns on and off normally when opening and closing the lid which confuses me greatly.
If it hibernates and I manage to boot it properly on the first try, I can confirm, that it is in fact hibernating and not powering off, as I am able to log in back into my previous session, with all applications still open, but if it powers down before booting and I manage to boot it after that it boots basically form scratch with everything that was open gone, so it is extremely unlikely that there is a problem with the power supply, motherboard power circuitry or the battery.
There is also (maybe) unrelated issue with weird malfunctioning columns of pixels on the display. For some time now, there has been a single column of weird looking pixels (not dead, just displaying wrong colors) at the left side of the screen (right around the left lid hinge), which randomly appears and disappears. Right before the hibernating issue started to manifest itself, the column became quite visible, about 10-20px width, but then most of them slowly disappeared and just a single line of pixels that still comes and goes randomly remained this way. Maybe this points out to the issue being with the GPU and not the sensor? Am I right to assume, that in the case of the dying GPU, it would require a full motherboard replacement, as the GPU is probably soldered to the motherboard without possible hope for an independent replacement?
It would be great if someone could point me to the right direction regarding the operation of the lid sensor in GL702VM, as I have been unable to find any relevant information so far. I am mostly interested in a way of completely disabling the lid sensor to confirm that it is in fact the culprit. The Windows Power Settings didn’t do the trick, so I am interested in a way to disable it at the hardware level by unplugging and/or removing it, as there is no BIOS setting, related to the sensor behavior apart from the ability to wake PC from sleep when lid is opened, disabling/enabling which didn’t have any effect.
So far I was unable to identify the location of the sensor and the corresponding magnets on the motherboard by dismantling the case and visually inspecting it, but I found the two magnets on what appears to be the left and right speaker modules and I am wondering if they have something to do with the issue. Also, if my suspicion about malfunctioning sensor confirms, I would like to know if and how it is possible to replace or repair the sensor.
To the best of my knowledge, the faulty sensor is the most possible explanation but maybe there is some alternative theories out there?