Windows on passthejoe

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

Sat, 09 May 2020 13:04:03 -0700

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.

Ruby gtk3 GUI applications ARE cross-platform

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 13:48:05 -0700

I’ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I’ve veered between Tk for Ruby or Python, JavaFX and Qt.

I recently stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby, and I’ve been going through a couple of tutorials in an attempt to figure it out.

Since I’m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I’d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you could run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I’d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.

Debian 10 Buster with GNOME 3: I didn't expect it to be this fast, but that could be the SSD talking

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 13:30:00 -0700

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.

And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.

My current fix for the Conexant-Flow.Exe-Firefox issue

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 20:27:13 -0700

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.

There is an rsync for Windows, and it works

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:34:27 -0800

I’ve been meaning to look into backup solutions for Windows, and while there should eventually be a full Ubuntu Linux shell coming to Windows 10, it’s not there yet unless you tweak things that I can’t ask other users to do.

So I figured that when the Linux shell comes to Windows, I’ll use rsync, the Unix/Linux backup utility I’ve been using for years.

I just found out that there’s already an rsync port to Windows called cwRsync that you can pay for, with a free command-line-only edition available for download.

Firefox vs. Chrome on Windows and Linux

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 17:51:06 -0800

I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.

But on my Windows 7 work machine, which is a more powerful (quad-core AMD to my laptop’s dual-core, with 8 GB of RAM to the laptop’s 4 GB), I flip it, using Chrome about 99 percent of the time.