The problem with Conexant's Flow.exe and Firefox has been fixed in Windows

I’m not sure who fixed it, or when, but somebody resolved the issue involving Firefox in Windows 10 laptops from HP and other manufacturers who use the Conexant audio hardware and software.

What happened in my 2017 laptop was that running the Firefox browser would cause a Conexant program called Flow.exe to start using a whole lot of CPU, causing the laptop to run hot – and poorly.

The “fix” at the time was to rename the Flow.exe file as _Flow.exe and ignore the Conexant audio system’s nag about Flow.exe being missing.

Today, for the first time in maybe a year, I renamed _Flow.exe as Flow.exe, rebooted into Windows and started Firefox.

Flow.exe is behaving, and Firefox runs great.

Thanks to whoever fixed this issue. I’m betting its the Firefox developers.

I don’t spend a whole lot of time running Windows on this laptop. Win 10 is on the 1 TB spinning drive, and Debian Stable is on the 250 GB M.2 SSD and is far and away faster. I expect I’d see a similar performance boost with Windows on an M.2 NVMe SSD, but that’s not how I have it set up.

Still, I could spend more time in Windows, and should that happen, I can run Firefox, with the cursed Flow.exe running, and have no problems. It probably won’t happen since I’m more confortable in Debian with GNOME – especially after discovering the bulk-file-renaming features hidden in GNOME’s Files/Nautilus when I “accidentally” selected two files and then tried to rename them. The global search and replace, including the addition of consecutive numbering if you want it – it’s so incredibly useful. It’s the kind of feature that keeps me using GNOME. If other file managers have it, I’d love to know about it.