Upgrading to Windows 11 is killing these laptops – Here’s what to do

Drivers tell computer components how to function by communicating with the operating system. Updates to these files are necessary and can add new functions or compatibility.

But everything doesn’t always go according to plan, as many laptop users recently discovered. It seems many people who upgraded their operating system to Windows 11 are encountering a driver problem that eats away at the available system memory.

Read for details on what is happening and what you can do about it.

Here’s the backstory

There appears to be a glitch with a driver found in Windows 11 on some HP laptops. It’s causing tons of memory to be used by a process that should be minimal.

The process causing chaos is a driver for the HP Hotkey UWP Service. This service is used for keyboard shortcuts that are associated with the F keys. For example, pressing Function on the keyboard and the F8 key could increase volume.

After updating to Windows 11, though, some HP users have complained that the HP Hotkey UWP Service uses as much as 90% of the available RAM. There is no logical reason for the process to gobble up that much memory. In almost all cases, the laptop becomes unresponsive as it struggles to cope with the demand.

What you can do about it

Hopefully, the driver hasn’t affected your HP laptop. But, unfortunately, there is not much that you can do about it if it has. Well, nothing official, that is. Some users on support threads have also noted with concern that HP has been silent on the matter even though the problem first appeared last year.

As there isn’t an official solution, others have tried to correct the problem themselves. Some work-around include:

Rollback the LAN/WLAN/WWAN Switching and Hot Key Service driver by right-clicking on the Start button and selecting Device Manager . Next, click on the down arrows until you see the process. Then, right-click on the process, click Properties and click Rollback Driver .

button and selecting . Next, click on the down arrows until you see the process. Then, right-click on the process, click and click . Reinstalling the driver might also help. You can do this by following the steps above, but instead of clicking on Rollback Driver, select Update Driver .

. If you struggle to find the process on your HP laptop’s Device Manager, right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager . Under Background Processes, scroll down until you see the process. Then, right-click on the name and select End Task . This will immediately kill the process, and you won’t be able to use the Function keys as shortcuts.

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