Notebook Hardware and Upgrade Questions

The side volume toggle on my Spectre does not work, it only registers a continuous "volume down" which causes the volume to be perpetually at 0. This also causes a perpetiaul indicator to appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen. 

I do not believe this is a software issue (I originally did) since I did a system restore to a known good state and the problem still persisted. Additionally, if I press in on the side volume toggle enough, the volume will rise, but as soon as I let go, it falls once again back to 0. 

I do not use these voulume buttons. I would like to disable them. However, I am weary about going into the device manager and disabling anything that looks like volume control. I am also weary about opening up the laptop and disabling the volume keys manually. 

I found a fellow who had a similar issue with volume toggle (https://goo.gl/osKja7), however, the device driver he mentions, "GPIO Buttons Driver" does not exist on my machine. I am still hopeful there is a way to find the keys and disable them.

The strange thing is this affects far more than I thought: I can't press the windows key to bring up the start menu, I can't switch windows, windows lose focus randomly, opening up a new window will often not make it active. It's an annoying issue, and I am considering just opening up the bottom, but I would like to find a better way first.

Any help would be appreciated. 

Thanks.