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- Notebook Audio
- Flow.exe spikes to 20% CPU and causes sporadic windows freez...

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12-27-2017 11:42 AM
Hi All,
For some time now, I have had issues with the Conexant ISST Audio driver. From time to time Windows 10/pro freezes for a short time, during this time I can see that flow.exe (C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\Flow) is using about 20% of the CPU. It should be noted that after a few minutes the CPU usage of flow.exe goes back to normal.
When no sounds are being played thought the Conexant sound card everything works fine.
Application that are being used during the audio the freeze are: foobar for some background music, skype for business and pidgin. Then opening new tabs in firefox (57) causes these freezes.
HW: ProBook 640 G3 i5-7200 16GB RAM.
All firmware and drivers are up to date.
Conexant ISST Audio: Driver date 2017-09-04 Driver version 9.0.164.0
I have tried the following:
Remove driver from add/remove programs. Windows found it again.
Remove driver from device manager, again Windows re-installed again.
What has help a little was to disable all sound processing via the volume mixer (Enhancement tab – System Effects Configuration)
Regards
Nikolay
01-10-2018 06:25 AM
Hi All!
Hi Nikolay!
It seams to be similar here:
HP Elitedesk 800 G3 TWR
Flow.exe >20% CPU-Usage - 1.4 GB memory usage
Conexant HD Audio (Driver date 2017-09-28 - Driver version 10.0.16299.15)
Windows freezing 3 - 5 times a day for 1 - 3 Minutes
I tried
audio driver update - no improvement
graphics driver update - no improvement
I know, this is the notebook forum, but the error is too similar to my problem, so I couldn't be silent ...
In my case, disabling the sounds is not a long time soloution.
Any other hints since december posting?
THX in advance!
Regards - philinx
01-10-2018 06:31 AM
No fix and still no response from HP.
Personally I am now sending all my audio via Bluetooth to a BT speaker. This works just fine.
A colleague of mine said to downgrade the audio driver - have not tried that.
01-12-2018 02:52 AM
After a HP support call with wrong infomation, I tryed to disable automatic driver update in
Control Panel | System and Security | System | Hardware | device installation settings
choose "No"
Sorry - only in german
But (!), this allone didn't work!
I have to change one and add another regestry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching
SearchOrderConfig = 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DriverSearching
SearchOrderConfig = 0
Windows 10 now using a default audio driver witch is working fine for me, there are no more freezed windows and without the flow.exe process the system saves 1.4 GB memory!
Maybe you can use this informations ... have a nice weekend!
01-21-2018 12:59 PM
Philinx, thanks! I had same trouble and resolved it by removing conexant driver and installing standard microsoft driver. It's unbelievable that conexant drivers are such as bloatware (consumes much RAM and CPU)!
03-03-2018 11:51 AM
@Chocholouswrote:Philinx, thanks! I had same trouble and resolved it by removing conexant driver and installing standard microsoft driver. It's unbelievable that conexant drivers are such as bloatware (consumes much RAM and CPU)!
Hi, how do you do that? Thanks.
03-27-2018 12:47 PM
You can remove (uninstall) it altogether:
Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager
Select (expand) Sound
Right click on CONEXANT (or Flow) ... I can't remember cause I unstalled
Click on Uninstall
I had another audio driver so I still have sound.
You may need to install the Windows sound driver here.
-RODONNELL