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HP Recommended
Hp Zbook 15u G5
Microsoft Windows 10 (64-bit)

Hi.

 

I've had a  HP Zbook 15u G5 for a while, and ever since i got it i've had an issue where it freezes randomly, i can pretty much work for a solid hour or longer and the the computer will freeze for 5 minutes and then go back to working, this will continue until i restart.

 

In the beginning i could see that the Flow process was taking a 100% of CPU and thought that it was a driver issue because the Laptop was so new on the market. So i basicly uninstalled the sound driver completely and used bluetooth devices for sound for a while (wich worked perfectly the freezing dissapeard completely)

Then after a while i decided to try again, and install the sound drive (this time newly downloaded) but the problem came again and it started to freeze. So i talked to HP support on the phone and they decided to change the motherboard to remedy the issue.

 

However now with a completely new motherboard and new bios and new drivers it's still freezing the computer. The sound weirdly enough contiunes, so if im listening to music it will play fine but the whole computer locks up, explorer.exe and everything.

 

Has anyone experienced this? or does anybody have an idea of why this happens?

Its an Hp Zbook 15u with Microsoft 10 professional 64bit 1803 update.

 

TLDR: Computer freezes in 5 minute intervals after about an hour of work when sound driver is installed, Works perfectly if i uninstall the sound driver. Event viewer says nothing.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
HP Recommended

I'm normally fairly measured about this sort of thing, but Flow is total junk and I wish HP would ship a version of the audio drivers without this or any other 'enhancement' so that us users don't have to live with the unfixed bugs that nobody at HP or their suppliers seem interested in fixing. A common failure scenario is that you run Firefox - that is often all you have to do to lock perhaps two cores at high usage after a few minutes. That isn't a complete disaster on my ZBook Studio x360 G5, which has a 6 core processor with 12 threads total, but it still wastes processor resources and energy, it makes Firefox unresponsive and I have to suffer unnecessary fan noise and heat from the computer.

 

There's something wrong in Flow that seems to thrash in its interaction with modern versions of Firefox after a while - and this desperately needs a fix. It seems that Flow's call to Firefox to check on what you are browsing fails under some fairly common circumstances (perhaps the code has not been updated for Firefox Quantum, i.e. Firefox 57 or later, perhaps the issue is something else), so it just tries over and over. It's as if the developers have never heard of behaving conservatively when using external APIs, for example by rate limiting calls.

 

 

There are various ways of permanently disabling Flow. Some involve registry edits. One that seems to work with minimal side-effects other than the loss of the (pretty much useless if you have this problem) enhancements is to load Services and set "CxAudioSvc" to Disabled, Apply, then Stop it. You might need to do the same with "CxUtilSvc" as well.

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5 REPLIES 5
HP Recommended

I'm normally fairly measured about this sort of thing, but Flow is total junk and I wish HP would ship a version of the audio drivers without this or any other 'enhancement' so that us users don't have to live with the unfixed bugs that nobody at HP or their suppliers seem interested in fixing. A common failure scenario is that you run Firefox - that is often all you have to do to lock perhaps two cores at high usage after a few minutes. That isn't a complete disaster on my ZBook Studio x360 G5, which has a 6 core processor with 12 threads total, but it still wastes processor resources and energy, it makes Firefox unresponsive and I have to suffer unnecessary fan noise and heat from the computer.

 

There's something wrong in Flow that seems to thrash in its interaction with modern versions of Firefox after a while - and this desperately needs a fix. It seems that Flow's call to Firefox to check on what you are browsing fails under some fairly common circumstances (perhaps the code has not been updated for Firefox Quantum, i.e. Firefox 57 or later, perhaps the issue is something else), so it just tries over and over. It's as if the developers have never heard of behaving conservatively when using external APIs, for example by rate limiting calls.

 

 

There are various ways of permanently disabling Flow. Some involve registry edits. One that seems to work with minimal side-effects other than the loss of the (pretty much useless if you have this problem) enhancements is to load Services and set "CxAudioSvc" to Disabled, Apply, then Stop it. You might need to do the same with "CxUtilSvc" as well.

HP Recommended

I'm at least somewhat happy that i'm not the only one, and you're exactly right, i'm using firefox as well.

We used to run HP for our company computers as well a couple of years ago and we had a ton of problems with Hp software as well so its not a suprise.

 

But thanks a lot for the tip, i've disabled the services and i'll see if the computer still freezes when i get to work tommorow 🙂

HP Recommended

I forgot to add - if Flow is still running, you will need to stop it via the Task Manager. Disabling CxAudioSvc stops Flow from automatically restarting if terminated.

 

There are suggestions online that editing the sqlite database and/or .ini file in the Flow program folder to corrupt the word "Firefox" in the list of process names fixes the problem, but I can't get this to work. I was more interested in getting on with using my computer than trying to save a questionable automatic audio "enhancement", so I went for disabling the services.

HP Recommended

Good thing you mentioned the flow process, hadn't thought about closing that as well since, yea it usually starts by its own.

 

I've been working for a good couple of hours now (using firefox) and i can say that already now it's gone from taking 70% with like 2 stack overflow windows it now has 10 tabs with both music and other stuff and only using 10% and not a single freeze so far so i think the services solution you mentioned deffinetly works!!!

 

Thanks a lot for the help, and hopefully the flow software will be fixed at some point 🙂

HP Recommended

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

 

I don't get it why this is still an issue?

I read somwere in one of the audio file updates that they fixed this issue.  However, I am now on a new HP Elitebook 840 G5 w/ all of the updates intstalled. And  I am still getting this stupid!!!! issue.

so freakinig frustating.

 

Thank you so much for this tip to fix it!

† The opinions expressed above are the personal opinions of the authors, not of HP. By using this site, you accept the <a href="https://www8.hp.com/us/en/terms-of-use.html" class="udrlinesmall">Terms of Use</a> and <a href="/t5/custom/page/page-id/hp.rulespage" class="udrlinesmall"> Rules of Participation</a>.