CLEVO Drivers Update Utility by OBSIDIAN-PC

Check for Windows updates, make sure your Windows is up to date please, if not install them

- Open Control Panel / Add Remove Programs and Uninstall everything related to Sound Blaster / Creative

- Reboot

- To make sure nothing is blocking our uninstallers you can even disabled any Antivirus software for the next steps - please do this!!!!!

- Install the SBX driver using the Updater

- Install Reaktek Audio using the Updater (even if already installed please install it again after installing SBX)

- Reboot (finish the realktek install and reboot again if needed)

- Check for Windows updates again, check for Windows Store updates too (it updates Realtek and Connect if needed)



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Nothing I do allows me to update my Soundblaster/Audio drivers. I have tried following the steps listed, but nothing works. When I try to uninstall the Creative drivers, I get an error saying "C:\Program" can't be found. This tells me a path in the registry, or somewhere is messed up. Is there a manual way to force uninstall the Soundblaster drivers?

I have also tried numerous times to update the Soundblaster drivers via the Updater app, but even though it says the version gets updated from 1.0.0 to 2.0.30, after a reboot, the version is back to 1.0.0.

Any advice?

 

I just did everything mentioned above and did not work. I actually went through the process several times, still not working. Volume is still maxed out all the time no matter what.

Also, I have to keep this machine up to date on a daily basis so thats never an issue.

 

Uninstall everything related to SBX / Creative, reboot, install the SBX again using the SBX from the CLEVO website for you model.
After you install it it should be fixed and you can now properly uninstall it.
If the install / uninstall process keeps failing chances are your AV software is blocking parts of the process.
After you get rid of it you can now use the Updater to install Audio and SBX following my previous instructions.

Can you tell me your laptop model, i just keep forgetting whatever each use user has

 

You shouldn't have to ask, or remember. Anyone posting in here who is looking for assistance should automatically include their system info in their signature...

 

Of course and no worries. I have a P870TM1.

 

I very much agree, this is why I just updated my signature with at least my model number. I will add full spec's later on or at some point.

 

As many of you know i been working on a DPC Optimizer for some time now.
While the most critical part of it is not ready yet there´s a part of the software that is already working and i kinda enjoy it:





Basically there are A LOT of software that allows you enable and disable hardware devices, heck Windows Device Manager allows you to do that since forever. BUT, what i always wanted was something that would allow me to quickly switch between a certain state and another. Yeah... i know, i could script that... but it´s not really the same...

So you might want a state where every hardware devices is disabled and you only leave enabled those that you REALLY REALLY need, we often do this for Music Production, but gamers might want to do this too because doing so usually reduces the Latency too.

With a quick switch that is available in the system tray icons or in the app itself you can toggle between your "Critical Mode" where you have previously defined what devices will be turned off and quickly toggle back to re-enable everything.

The fact that it´s an app also means that i can white-flag devices either because they cannot be disabled or because they are software devices and disabling them does nothing (A LOT OF DRIVERS are already white-flagged in this version, i´ll keep adding more as i test more systems with this).

This is the first tab for this software, which you can already use if you want:

http://johnkeelnas.com/files/BETAS/DPCFixer01.zip

Not sure the "Add to Startup is even working... probably not for now"

Incoming:
- The current tab needs a bit of extra code that i just noticed, the ability to detect devices that CANNOT be turned off and flag them in yellow maybe without the checkbox on the right, i´ll do that soon...
- The next tab will deal with optimizing interrupt priority and switching to MSI mode
- Another tab will be a "Recommended for Uninstall" which will basically be detection and recommendation for uninstall of some drivers or apps that ruin the DPC values
- And another tab should probably be a list of known Windows tweaks for DPC purposes.
- Final tab will handle measurements, either internal or simple "how to"

Free or License? Up to you:
Will this app always be free? Not sure.... it is for now because it was done 100% on my free time at home, so if i keep having time to work on this at home i will, otherwise i´ll have to do it at work and depending on the amount of hours this needs it will probably be license based.

So please consider donating to give me some extra motivation to do more free stuff at home.

I would also like to thank @joluke and Danis (not even sure what his nick is here), they made two donations that allowed me to buy a new decent mouse, which i know... seems like nothing special, but trust me, every time i use it i feel appreciated and it motivates me to do more stuff in my free time. Charging for licenses is a necessity for the company, getting donations is just a personal motivation for the free stuff.

 

The first donation of many! My pleasure to help you keep motivated

 

Done, have fun john.

 

I just wanted to ask, when and where does this "usability" actually come into play? Could you provide a valid use case in which the utilization of this toggling behavior is advantageous?

 

Ohhh yeah maybe I should take some time to explain the logic.

But here is a resume:
If you measure the DPC you will notice there's often one or two drivers that are causing spikes.
Spikes will ruin recording data with low buffers like recording Audio or It will be felt in a game in the form of frame skip or input lag.

Some of the usual culprits are WiFi drivers or LAN drivers, NVIDIA Audio, battery methods etc.

So if you don't need any of those drivers while doing your critical task (even if your Critical task is hamming) just disable them.

ACPI.sys is usually another culprit, that might not be easy to solve since various process and drivers might be stacking on it and you can't see which are lagging it. But I'll show that in a more extensive post.

This deserves a proper write-up with a how-to measure, how to disable, causes of the different symptoms, etc.
I'll probably make a video about this soon.

Just need to find a bit of time.

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This is very interesting to me - audio recording, mostly. Looking forward to your tutorial also. I have a few questions about this.

Say, LatencyMon is reporting that ACPI is showing high latency. Should I care? What I'm really interested in is whether the tasks and processes that are important to me (e.g. those being used for live audio capture/ recording) are experiencing latency or not.

Also, could we make profiles, and could your application guide us in this? E.g. for audio optimisation, these are the processes that need to be whitelisted. DAW, audio drivers, disk drivers, etc. Maybe group such processes and show them in a different colour? Multi-select these processes to put them into a profile?

What are your thoughts on running such processes with a higher priority? Could your app take care of that with a single click that selects the desired profile?

 

No, No, No and no, i understand your thought logic, seen similar logics way too often in many places, it simply does not work like that.
You simply have no isolation and thread priority will not mean much, the problem is not there!!

This is going to be the worst explanation in the history of explanations, but i hope it allows you to understand:

Imagine a traffic officer, a cop, who is there with 4 lanes behind him and a queue of traffic on front of him. Each lane is a CPU (or a core if you want).

The cop job is rather easy, but he is very dumb, a car gets in front of him and he just funnels him to the fastest available lane.
Sometimes some cars will have a priority card, often some schmuck who should not have it but since he knows the cousin of the town mayor he got a priority card.

Now the officer routes this supposed high priority car (a schmuck with the prius) to the Lane1, then arrives another good man who is also a high priority card owner, he´s in a hurry because he´s on his motorcycle transporting organs that have just been donated and he needs to deliver them to save someone life ( lets say this fast working guy is a Audio related thread).

Now here´s the shocker, would you believe that the stupid cop just sent him over to the same Prius lane, yeah he will have to wait until the Prius gets out of the way so he can do his thing....

And now you say "OMG what a stupid system".... no, it gets worse, what if i tell you that there´s someone above the COP? Lets call him the Kernel, this big and powerful dude can even halt threads, yeah you can get an interrupt on the same CPU that you are processing Audio. An Interrupt will halt a thread even if the thread is running at maximum priority.

So you get your Audio Stuff running at highest priority, but then there are two things out of your control, the DPCs and ISRs, both run at elevated IRQs and they will run immediately most of the times, even if it halts whatever thread was running on that CPU.... scary right?

So what does that mean for us, simple a system is only as good as the slower ISR or DPC routine, that´s it...
ISR/DPC should run as fast as possible, but bad code and drivers will often give higher then optimal execution times on those, so it does not matter anything else, sooner or later your a Audio thread or your Graphics thread (for gamers) will get halted by one of those stupid ISR/DPCs and you will get a Audio spike, a frame skip, input lag, whatever!!

Microsoft solution: "Hey everyone do good stuff and never have execution times above 100us. Ok? I´ll go now, but i trust you all will comply."

Developers and Manufacturers: "Hey bro, do you think 1000us is too much?", "Nahhh it´s ok"


EDIT:
I´m not saying that the way threads or interrupts are handled are wrong, it´s not the system or implementation of the OSes and CPU architecture that is BAD, it´s the fact that manufacturers make hardware and drivers that completely ignore the execution times that is a major problem.

I know Windows is not a Realtime OS, it does not give you any warranty for the IRQ execution timeframe, so it´s up to developers and manufacturers to assure and test their products to achieve this.

Some would say "Hey but MacOS doesnt have this problem!" yeah the OS is built more in the fashion of a Realtime OS, the ecosystem is controlled, Apple will not sell you hardware with high execution times and if you are developing stuff for Apple please be my guest and try to sell flawed stuff like that, good luck.... well at least that was the reality some years ago, not sure now.
While in Windows anything goes and manufacturers do not cherry pick tested hardware against flawed high executions/dpcs/watever...

The solution, make this problem public, bash NVIDIA (one of the worst in this matter), bash CLEVO if some hardware part is flawed against this issue.

If the user do not start selecting hardware based on this they are buying crap without even knowing. I rather have a low DPC/ISR that i can run my stuff in almost real-time then having a 3000€ machine spiking at 1000us+


EDIT2:

Threads (where software developers sometimes screw you):
The system treats all threads with the same priority as equal. The system assigns time slices in a round-robin fashion to all threads with the highest priority. If none of these threads are ready to run, the system assigns time slices in a round-robin fashion to all threads with the next highest priority. If a higher-priority thread becomes available to run, the system ceases to execute the lower-priority thread (without allowing it to finish using its time slice), and assigns a full time slice to the higher-priority thread. For more information, see Context Switches.
The priority of each thread is determined by the following criteria:
The priority class of its process
The priority level of the thread within the priority class of its process
The priority class and priority level are combined to form the base priority of a thread. For information on the dynamic priority of a thread, see Priority Boosts.
Priority Class
Each process belongs to one of the following priority classes:
IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS
BELOW_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS
NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS
ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS
HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS
REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS

DPCs/ISRs (where hardware developers sometimes screw you):
Devices connected to the system may interrupt on a connected CPU and cause their interrupt service routines to execute. An interrupt can occur on the same processor that an audio program is running on. Any thread that was running on the processor on which an interrupt occured will be temporarily halted regardless of its priority. The interrupt service routine (ISR) is executed and may schedule a DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) to offload an amount of work. The DPC will most likely run immediately on the same processor which means the audio application will halt until both the ISR and the DPC routines have finished execution. That is because ISRs and DPCs run at elevated IRQL which means they cannot become preempted by the thread dispatcher (scheduler). Therefore to guarantee responsiveness of the system, ISR and DPC routines should execute as fast as possible. Guidelines say that they should not spend more than 100 µs of execution time however this is often not reached due to hardware factors beyond the control of the driver developer. If execution time gets too high, the audio program may be unable to deliver audio buffers to the hardware in a timely manner.

 

Great explanation. What's your take on reserving a couple of cores for our stuff? I remember the days when a CPU had just one core - even logical processors came later. Now I've got 4 cores/ 8 logical processors. Is there some way of reserving a couple of them for our exclusive use? Like a VIP lane on the road - no one gets there except audio stuff.

Alternatively, lock the slow drivers to using a particular core/ processor.

 

That could work if you disable hyperthreading and if there was an easy way to set affinity for all devices irqs.... If only...

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Hello good sir. Your Fan Control... Have you process numbers aka how much this tool will tax the Cpu in real time? Thanks.

 

Quite low but thats not even the thing. My software is not doing anything that will make ISRs or DPCs spike, it just isn't, it's high speed and fast exec time and does not hog on any driver like the ACPI.sys.

I try to code responsible, I care more about that then actual CPU loads or memory usage, CPUs are monsters this days, screwing a OS because your lazzy to properly develop your hardware and drivers is just another level of bad, specially when it comes from companies like NVIDIA.

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For free users of the Fan Control, could you please consider unlocking basic functionality - just the Maximum, EC Auto and Silent - what was available in the CCC, but is not available now because we don't want to mess up Control Station and Keyboard LED by installing CCC?

 

Yeah that makes sense, I'll do that.

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Good Day,,

I just purchased the updater after spending some time long ago with the old obsidian tools, the old tools offer me updated clevo control center, however this new one does not seem to.

Is that normal?

 

Or you can buy the app and give John some appreciation for his work? I did

It's not that expensive and keeps him motivated!

 

I've bought the Updater. I have some - er - ideological differences about his approach to the algorithms used for fan control, so I'm staying away from that for now. I do need maximum and silent modes, though, which is why I asked.

 

Because we made our own version of CCC and released it for free, it's called "Control Station".
Updater + Control Station (which is free) + Keyboard LED (which is free) all together offer more functionality then the old OBSIDIAN-TOOLS.

Follow my signature to get them.

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I guess you could discuss what approach would be the best in your opinion so that he might implement it or you might find even a better solution. It doesn't seem like John is closed to any suggestion to be fair.

 

Hi @John@OBSIDIAN-PC, does P650RS-G is shared heatpipe?

 

If it´s something that i can do i guess i can try, there´s a lot of features, in all the software i made, that includes options that are there only because a single user asked for them, that shows how open i am...

Yes it is!

 

Updater updated.
P955ET with quadro added.


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Hi! Bugrepost: Last version Keyboard led 1.0.1 dont working ): It`s doing nothings. But older version working fine.

Guys, does anyone have a problem with the latest Nvidia drivers? On the latest drivers, there is a laptop with G-sync on to sleep mode, then after a few minutes it will reboot with an error Power Kernel 41. I rolled back to the previous version, and it works normally.On the official forum, many who have the error occurs. I think it would be better not to offer the latest Nvidia drivers in the update until they correct the error.

 

Running the latest NVIDIA driver on all my systems without any problem.

As for the Keyboard LED are you running Fan Control too?
For Keyboard LED to work best it needs a service that gets installed by Fan Control.
PM me if you need help setting it all up.

 

Could we have instant wake for the keyboard backlight? When I type on the keyboard at night, the first few strokes are with no backlight as it takes a while to turn on.

 

Wow, I thought I'm actually the only one who was getting this kind of a problem with the GPU. I have a non G-sync version, but, whenever screen turns off because of idling, sometimes, it won't come on again. So, its like, the laptop is booted but you can't do anything because there is not only no image on the screen, it's also frozen, so only hard reboot helps. Sometimes, the laptop reboots on its own and you can find the system reboot 0x00000116 error, which coresponds to the GPU. I don't remember exactly with which driver this problem appeared, but it's around a month ago or so. Probably, the BIOS updates or Windows could cause this issue as well, but I'm still hoping for this to be fixed.

 

In that case, I think adding a dropdown or something to the sleep timer with the different keyboard animations would be nice. So after the sleep timer expires you can either have them just turn off, or have a sort of keyboard 'screen-saver'.

Also, of course, per-key support so I can actually use it in the first place. I'd be willing to help with this part if I can.

 

Also, the Fan Control and Keyboard LED windows are hidden behind the Control Station window when the respective launch icons in the Control Station are clicked. The Updater starts off in front, which is the desired behaviour.

 

Unless i get a per-key it is going to be really hard to do that.

Done, will be available on next update.

Please Update both Fan Control and Keyboard LED
Just released an update that should provide faster communication between the apps.
Applying a Keyboard LED color or a Fan value should be a lot faster now.

 

Totally broke KeyboardLED for me after updating both apps and then rebooting. Now I have no backlight at all.

Exited the app and re-opened it. Re-applied my settings. Clicked the Disabled button and applied and then clicked the Enabled button and applied. None of these fixes it.



Version 1.0.2 installed.

 

Do you have Fan Control too?
As i said Keyboard LED uses the same service. If Fan Control is able to report temperature then Keyboard LED should be able to use it´s service.

 

Yes. I indicated that I had updated both. Fan Control appears to be functioning fine. Version 2.3.1.

 

I just rebooted again. When KeyboardLED launches, the keyboard LED's light up as they should. They stayed lit while I was typing. They continued to work fine for about 5 minutes. I allowed them to go out with a 1 minute delay (no typing), and when I pressed a key they came back on. They continued working for a few more minutes, and then I stopped typing again and allowed the delay to turn them off. Now they simply won't come back on. Seems to be a communication problem. Last reboot, they simply didn't come on at all. This time, they won't come back on after working properly for a little while.

 

Yeah dimmer gets crazy :O will fix it soon.

 

Please try updating now...
Let me know how it works on your system.

 

Both apps updated and the laptop rebooted. So far, so good. Will let you know if anything changes. Thank you!!

 

This is now working as desired when the Fan Control and Keyboard LED windows are not open, i.e. they are sitting in the system tray. However, if they are already open, clicking the icon in the Control Station is not bringing them to the top.

Also, if Fan Control and Keyboard LED are not already running, and clicking the respective icon in Control Station is used to start them (they go to the tray, which is fine), then clicking the respective icon in Control Station is still opening the windows behind the Control Station. If you close those windows, and then click the icon again, this time they are properly opened on top.

Note: this is NOT critical - just minor stuff you could do in a future version when you have time (or if you're training a potential assistant).

 

As i said that is already fixed, but will only be available when i release the next Control Station update

The updates i made for Keyboard LED and Fan Control were not the solution for that.

Btw, i just played around with some animates to add on some events of the keyboard... kinda looks dope!!!

Unfortunately my "R" key just died on me... anyone got suggestions for a good and cheap mechanical keyboard?

 

I have a block-by-default firewall set, with Windows Firewall Control set to prompt. If I remove the rules for each app's updater, so that they are blocked, the updater seems to be hung by the time I permit the access. Is this expected? It's a little tricky in this situation because there's no 'abort' or 'cancel' button (assuming that the updater should simply keep retrying until it gets a connection), and the user has to make a choice to close the updater via task manager and hope nothing broke.

A small detail, probably, but I hope it's useful.

 

Yeah i must confess i never wasted proper time in the no-connection department, i should tough, will try to fix that as soon as possible.

 

So it took me all day to add P9xxEN_EF_ED support...
And guess what, CLEVO new Insyde stuff and CC implementation actually add two drivers that are installed with CCC... users who do not want to use CCC will have two drivers shown as "unknown" in the device manager....
Bunch of crap... trying to remove those toasts...

 

I use a Corsair K63 Wireless SE, and having all the wireless features works very well in a laptop situation. Plus it's TKL

 

Got this error while updating to Intel VGA driver 25.20.100.6618

P957HR

EDIT: uninstalled old driver with DDU. Then the new driver installed without further trouble.

 

Yeap just noticed that, i will have to add an uninstall first for the Intel VGA, should be easy enough.

Update:
Updater added initial support for P960 P970 EN_EF_ED

Next update will have more drivers and the ability to install the drivers (clear the toasts) that are CCC related.