My GPD Pocket 3 is experiencing issues turning on and I am out of ideas as to why and now seeking help.
It’s behaviour has been irrational, so I’ll outline a short chronology of the events.
Two days ago - No issues.
Last night - Refused to wake from sleep (unplugged from charger). Light was on but screen was dark. I rebooted from the on/off button. Light on, screen dark, then turned off on its own. Plugged it in, turned it on. Battery was 100%. Unplugged and it still worked. Software used were Ms Edge, VS Code and Blender; nothing unusual. Put it to sleep for the night.
Today - Would not start, unplugged, and the light would not even turn on. Plugged it in and the light would turn on, but screen stayed dark. Unplugged and now the light turned on for a while before turning off on its own. Plugged it back in and the light would stay on, accompanied by a new high-pitched whine for about ten seconds, then the CPU fan would speed up every five seconds
I read in another thread here (though for a GPD Win) to unplug the battery and plug it back in. Tried that.
Now it turns on slowly. It behaves the same as before in that the light is on, the screen is dark and the machine whines before dramatic CPU fan noises. It does turn on after that, however.
Does anyone know what is happening here and why? I’d like to fix it before it gets any worse.
Sorry for my etiquette. I try to give as much information as possible, but I keep thinking of more.
The device is about two months old. Bought online from an official-looking online store.
The charger is the stock one. I have been charging my phone with it while travelling and using a different cable with multiple jacks. It has worked fine for the last two months, so I have not considered the power adapter to be cooked.
The fan is often quite loud for simple tasks, such as downloading a file on the Edge browser.
I have just realised that the battery indicator says 12% and charging, but I had not received any low battery warnings last night.
Update:
The GPD Pocket 3 still works, but is slow to start up unless I plug it in for five minutes before turning it on. This leads me to suspect a dud battery, but I really can’t be sure.
I’d previously bought a Pocket 3 with a dud keyboard that typed “fj” whenever f or j was pressed. I had that returned and tried a different seller. Both machines came with a quality check approval slip.
A stab in the dark: it could just be a faulty battery. Any help would be appreciated, but the situation is technically manageable. I’ll check back in a few days.
The machine is dead now. Has not been able to start since yesterday. I did catch one odd blue screen about a driver error for NTFS.sys.
Case closed, I guess. Cheers, guys.
Thanks for the reply. I have not contacted GPD yet.
There’s been another, more confusing development: i bought an m.2 to usb adapter online for like $10. The plan was to salvage important files, using a machine with a functional NTFS.sys and copy the functional NTFS.sys over manually. I took out the SSD, plugged it into an old desktop (Win7), got most of my files that weren’t cooked on a USB and tried to copy the .sys file. Couldn’t do it, apparently due to a cocktail of permissions issues and file location errors. Reassembled, ready to try the reset hole, and thought I’d try one more time to turn it on.
It hit me with a “Scanning drivers” message on the GPD splash screen. Then it switched to “fixing” or something like that. Then it rebooted. I’ve never seen anything like this; usually the GPD splash screen is just static, like some sort of unskippable ad that comes up whenever I boot up. All without network connection, too.
Now it works…? I’m anxiously glad. I have no idea what’s happening with my machine anymore and I feel it will BSOD again any second for another unknown reason.
