Clevo laptop doesn't recognize 3.5mm audio jack anymore, plays all sounds through speakers instead

This happened yesterday for the first time. Up until 2 days ago there were no problems.

The earphones are fine, I tried 2 different ones and also tried them on other devices, they work.

Something changed in the Window's software, it's not a hardware problem.

When I boot the computer with the earphones plugged, before Windows loads up I can hear some faint whitenoise in the earphones, meaning that the audio is correctly being playing through them, but as soon as Windows starts loading up, the earphones get muted and all audio is played from the laptop speakers instead.

Whatever caused this changed in behaviour also affected the mouse drivers, since now my mouse's configured profile (which determines cursor sensitivity and stuff) loads up only after a few seconds after I logged into my account in Windows, while before it was being loaded right away even before logging in.

Anyways I already tried uninstalling and installing the latest Realtek audio drivers.
In the Windows privacy settings, the microphone access setting is set to On.

I'm running Windows 10, version 1903, build 18362.720.

Please help!

 

Did you checked if the audio jack port is clean inside? There might be a bad connection.

Sent from my GM1900 using Tapatalk

 

Thanks for your reply. Yes I checked. I used my phone's flashlight to shine inside the hole. I could see to the end of it, it looked clear.

I noticed another strange thing about my mouse. As I said, now the mouse custom settings are only loaded a few seconds after logging into the Windows account. However, on the welcome screen, before logging into my Windows account, sometimes the custom mouse sensitivity for the horizontal axis is still loaded properly, but not the vertical. So it would move left-right normally, but up and down it would go very slow. Of course, once logging into the Windows account, after a few seconds, all the mouse configurations are loaded properly and the mouse moves at normal speed again and all other mouse functions are restored. I don't get what's going on, something must have messed up my boot up configuration, but it happened overnight without any real changes to the system.

 

Often you can get white noise before the system loads as the drivers are not active and active noise cancelling is not working.

 

I see.... so that proves that on a hardware level the jack still works, right? If there was something wrong with it physically, I wouldn't hear anything at all.

So what could I do?

 

It means a signal is being transmitted but the jack detection may be malfunctioning.

 

I have opened my laptop various times before (it's a Clevo P771ZM), but I'm not sure if the audio jack is physically reachable or if I can manipulate it any way... would you happen to know?

 

The audio board does require some disassembly to get to but it can be reached.

 

Tonight when I get a chance, I'll hope it up as far as I can and try to have a look.

If you think you can find any schematics, that would be of tremendous help. Thanks!

 

Update: I just spent over a couple of hours fiddling with the chassis of the laptop. No luck.

I removed as many screws and components as I could, but the audio jack is shielded by a big solid chunk of black plastic (or metal?) that appears to be a single piece that runs all across the base of the laptop itself, and it seems to be a single piece as well with the main chassis.

A picture here from another thread in this forum:
I couldn't remove it.

Audio jack still doesn't work. I have no idea what to do. Try to update the bios maybe? But it worked one day and then suddenly it stopped working... what could it be?