The problem for users of Windows laptops using the Conexant audio driver that makes Conexant's Flow.exe program eat large amounts of CPU when the Firefox web browser is running has not been solved by "conventional" means.

And in order to be part of the "solution," should one ever come, I filed a bug with Mozilla on the issue.

There have been many fixes proposed for this problem, which only seems to manifest itself on my HP Envy laptop while running Firefox. You hear the fan rev up almost immediately and then can see both Firefox and Flow.exe climb in the amount of CPU they are taking, combining for a total of about 60% on my laptop.

This has been going on for many months, and a couple of days ago I got tired of being forced to run Chrome. It's not right that I can't use the privacy-loving Firefox on my Windows 10 laptop.

So I went back to one of the "fixes" that works:

To keep Flow.exe from running constantly and stealing excessive CPU while you are using Firefox or any other program, just change the name Flow.exe to something like _Flow.exe (I just added an underscore) so the Conexant audio system can no longer "find" it. Trust me, sound works fine without it. Why it's there at all is a mystery.

You can find Flow.exe in this folder: C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\Flow. Just rename Flow.exe as _Flow.exe (or whatever you want; changing its name is enough to keep it from running). I'm not sure whether or not you need to reboot after this, but it couldn't hurt.

Once you rename Flow.exe, You will get a popup every time you restart the PC warning you that you need to reinstall your Conexant audio software because Flow.exe is missing. Ignore this nagging box. I'd like to send Conexant a few popups, or maybe I should send my good wishes to Logitech, the company that bought Conexant a few years ago. Both are garbage. They're certainly not seeing what I'm saying about them on Twitter and consequently falling all over me to fix anything. No, it's radio silence. F&^% 'em.

tl;dr: Take care of Flow.exe problems, especially with Firefox, by renaming Flow.exe so Conexant can't find it.

I've been dealing with problems caused by the Conexant audio driver in Windows 10 while running Firefox for the entire year, and turning off services in the Windows configuration no longer works.

What happens, for those not following along, is that the Conexant "SmartAudio" driver has a program called Flow.exe that somehow helps it figure out what kind of audio you "need" at any given moment. It somehow can't figure out what to do with the Firefox web browser, and when you run that browser in Windows 10, Flow.exe runs all the time and take a substantial portion of available CPU, causing the fan to run high and the computer to work sluggishly.

Originally I was able to turn off whatever service was triggering Flow.exe. Recently that hasn't worked, so I turned to another solution I found on the internet: Renaming Flow.exe so the Conexant software can't find it and can't run it. By the way, doing this breaks nothing. Audio works fine.

To do this on your system, just change the name of Flow.exe. I changed mine to _Flow.exe. You can find Flow.exe here: C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\Flow\Flow.exe.

Before I did this, my Task Manager (which you can see with ctrl-shift-esc) output looked like this:

After renaming Flow.exe, I'm getting a message in the HP Support Assistant to update my Conexant driver, which I'm NOT doing and won't do until they get yet another new version. I also get this popup whenever I reboot:

Despite these two "nags," from Windows, everything is working.

Update on May 29, 2019: After continual nagging about the Conexant audio service not working, I finally relented and installed the latest version of the driver. My problems with Firefox and Conexant's Flow.exe returned immediately (super-high CPU all the time).

I decided to try a different hack from the HP forum: "Tricking" Flow.exe into ignoring Firefox by changing the reference to firefox to fyrefox in C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\Flow\data.sqlite, which is just a text file (that's the kind of database that SQLite is). I started PowerShell as an administrator, navigated to the file, opened it in Vim, searched for firefox and deliberately misspelled it.

I rebooted the laptop. I restarted Firefox. It DIDN'T work. I tried it so you don't have to.

This is a mess. Bang & Olfusen is the licensee for the sound on this laptop, and this association with such poor technology doesn't make me think fondly of B&O. Other companies that have failed users include HP and Conexant.

Here is yet another thing to try, courtesy of another frustrated user in the HP forum: Use PowerShell to kill Flow.exe dead.

When a device driver kills your computer's performance, but only when run in conjunction with a certain web browser, and that certain web browser is not Google Chrome, good luck with getting your problem fixed.

That's what's happening to my HP Envy 15 as133cl laptop. Running Google Chrome poses no problems.

But when I run Mozilla Firefox, the laptop's Conexant audio driver has a program called Flow that does something related to figuring out what kind of audio your PC might want to play. And when Firefox is running, Flow can't seem to figure out what is going on and runs all the time, taking a large percentage of available CPU along with it.

I solved this problem with an Internet search. It was easy and painless.

After I installed the new driver, the problem returned. I'm lazy enough that all I did was bring up the Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete, then select it) and kill Flow from there. I haven't rebooted since, Flow hasn't returned, and I'm having zero issues with audio on the computer.

Update: It's annoying that killing those two processes doesn't stop Flow from killing laptop performance. There is a third Conexant process that I should kill to see if it takes care of the Flow problem. Why it's STILL a problem, I don't know. If it affected Chrome, it would cause a major uproar and be fixed in a week or less.

I've been using the Windows command line's copy command to create empty files, but there's another easy way to do the same thing using Git for Windows.

Once you install Git in Windows, every time you're in a folder, a right-click of the mouse gives you the choices Git GUI here and Git Bash here.

If you then left-click on Git Bash here, a Linux/Unix-like terminal will open at the path of your folder, and you can use any number of Bash commands.

To create a file, use the Unix/Linux stalwart touch:

$ touch filename

This will give you a file named filename. Substitute the file name you really want.

Then close the terminal. That's all there is to it.

The Windows file manager lets you create all kinds of new, empty files as long as they either have a .txt extension or are of a Microsoft file type.

I just wanted to create empty files with no extension that I can later open in Gvim.

Basically I want the Windows equivalent of the Unix/Linux command touch.

There's a complicated Stack Overflow page on this topic, and the easiest method by far is this one that uses the Windows command line:

C:\Users\name\your\path> copy nul filename

Substitute the filename you want for filename, and you're good to go.

I've seen ways of turning this into a batch file and then somehow right-clicking to invoke it, but for now I'll just open the Windows terminal and use it that way.

I turned the laptop off and only booted once from Puppy Linux's Xenialpup over the weekend. When I turned on the laptop (2017 HP Envy) to start working in Windows 10, today, for some reason the desktop remembered that I had at least one Google Chrome tab and a few apps open.

I also started a new Chrome window for my "main" work, and the laptop was aggressively swapping for maybe a half-hour, during which time things barely worked, or were just slow as hell -- whatever you want to call it.

Now that I've been working for a couple of hours, everything is working well, but this just serves as a point of evidence that Windows 10, right when it starts up, isn't exactly ready for "vigorous computing."