Owners of some HP laptops are complaining on official forums and customer service channels that, after upgrading to Windows 11 , the HP Hotkey UWP program is causing serious problems. The program, which runs in the background, starts consuming large amounts of memory. This can eventually render their laptops unusable due to insufficient memory if they don't regularly free up memory using the Task Manager.
Several HP customers have taken to HP support forums to complain about the problem. The HP Hotkey UWP service is a driver that allows the Fn key on the laptop keyboard to be used with the F1-F0 keys to perform certain tasks, such as adjusting the audio volume. It starts when Windows boots on an HP laptop, and all modern keyboards with multimedia keys do this. It's a very simple function that would otherwise require a negligible amount of RAM , but the latest driver in Windows 11 is causing serious memory problems.
A simple driver is causing serious problems
Users have complained that while in Windows 10 it occupied a minimal amount of memory, since it only had to respond to commands when called and perform a simple action, HP Hotkey UWP in Windows 11 is consuming a huge amount of memory, with one user reporting that it's using a whopping 49 GB of their laptop's 64 GB of RAM.
This is obviously a sign that something is wrong, as no app should take up that much memory. Everything points to an issue like a memory leak with the Windows 11 implementation of the HP Hotkey UWP service.
This issue isn't affecting all HP laptops. It doesn't appear to be widespread across all HP laptops, but we want to warn you that it could happen to many users. We recommend disabling the driver, if possible, to try and prevent a keyboard response driver from hogging the RAM. We'll have to wait for HP or Microsoft to confirm the widespread existence of the HP Hotkey UWP problem in Windows 11 and release an update, since such a serious RAM leak renders any laptop unusable, and many users rely on them for studies and remote work.
Source: TechRadar
