Disable "automatic maintenance" in Windows 8

Question

I'm running a few VMs, and suddenly I noticed my CPU fan was spinning louder than usual. I tracked it down to Windows 8 doing some "automatic maintenance":

How can I turn this completely off? I found a way to set the time, but not a way to turn it off completely.

Answer 1

You can do it by task scheduler. For this open the task scheduler by typing task on the Modern UI under the Apps and you will find the Task Scheduler at the left side click it and open. Now go to following path

Task Scheduler > Microsoft > Windows > Task Scheduler

Here you have to right click on the Idle Maintenance & Regular Maintenance and select the option disable, that's it!

If you want to enable it again then just do the reverse.

Answer 2

Automatic maintenance does too many functions, like the updating of Windows software etc. so that turning it totally off is not advisable (or possible).

To complete the answer by nhinkle, one could at least disable it from waking your PC.

This is done in Action Center / Maintenance section / Change maintenance settings, uncheck "Allow scheduled maintenance to wake up my computer".

Together with setting the scheduled time to late at night or a time that it won't be a bother (3 AM is the default), is about the maximum possible solution.

Answer 3

The Automatic Maintenance task is a built-in scheduled task, but if you think you can just open task scheduler as an administrator and disable it you’re wrong. It will just re-enable itself on Servre 2012 as @abstrask pointed out. You'll need to use the psexec utility (Sysinternals) together with schtasks.exe, and you need to run the command as SYSTEM. Use the following command:

psexec \\SERVERNAME -s schtasks /change /tn "\Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler\Maintenance Configurator" /DISABLE

In my scenario, I was testing this on my Hyper-V host, so I simply skipped the \SERVERNAME switch.

psexec -s schtasks /change /tn "\Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler\Maintenance Configurator" /DISABLE

Command to run

After you run the command, you can verify the task is now disabled in the Task Scheduler

Answer 4

While you can disable the "Idle Maintenance" and "Maintenance Configurator" tasks, under \Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler, they will get re-enabled by the "Maintenance Configurator" task, which by default runs at 01:00 every day. In addition, it has two custom triggers, which cannot be viewed or edited using the Task Scheduler console.

Even as an admin, you don't have permission to disable the "Maintenance Configurator" task, though I haven't tried any "tricks" to do so - If Microsoft has gone through these lengths to prevent you from disabling it, it's probably a bad idea to do.

The relatively "clean" way I found to disable Idle and Regular Maintenance, that seems to still work after the "Maintenance Configurator" task has run, is to disable the triggers of the "Idle Maintenance" and "Maintenance Configurator" tasks.

The task will remain enabled, but with triggers disabled, it won't actually start.

(My answer is based on Windows Server 2012, which also has this "feature". I'm assuming it's setup the same way. Correct if I'm wrong)

Answer 5

There is no supported way to disable automatic maintenance altogether.

You can make changes in Group Policy to determine when maintenance should occur, and to implement a random delay to help avoid all VMs running maintenance at the same time. To open group policy settings editor, run gpedit.msc from the run dialog. These settings are under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Maintenance Scheduler.

The scheduled tasks show up in the task scheduler (to open, type that in from the start menu) under Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics and Microsoft > Windows > Maintenance. The events don't have any triggers specifically defined though, and the actions are "custom handlers" that can't be edited.

I did find that the executable for the maintenance tasks is MSchedExe.exe. You could potentially write a scheduled task to run shortly after the scheduled maintenance time to kill that executable right after it starts up. Not sure how reliable that would be though.

Answer 6

OK, I had this invasive Auto Maintenance cause crashes, break network connections requiring reinstall of devices, and I've read about other people having all their solid state memory de-fragmented so as to reduce theri life.

Disaabling it in Task Scheduler doesn't work, it gets enabled. Try this:

ComputerMng>TaskScheduler>Microsoft>Windows>TaskScheduler>

RClick RegularMaintenance>Properties
  Conditions> "change Start the task only if idle" from 0 to 1 minute,
    else you get a "must be greater than 0" error message when saving.
  Triggers> select default 3am trigger> Edit>
    uncheck "Enabled", set to start 01/01/2111, every 100 days
  Settings> uncheck "Run ASAP after schedule missed"

If you don't like it because you think you'll still be around in 2111, then bully for you.

Answer 7

You can actually completely disable this via Group Policy in Windows 7/Server 2008r2 and later.

From http://www.blackmanticore.com/9161925e79e9d060c41e2e4160392218:

The policy can be found here: Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\system\Troubleshooting and Diagnostics\Scheduled maintenance

And "Disabled" is one of the options. Enabling gives you the option for fully automated maintenance, or just detect and notify.

Answer 8

You can disable Computer Maintenance in an easy way now.

To disable the System Maintenance troubleshooter, follow these steps:

Click Startstart button, and then click Control Panel.

Under System and Security, click Find and fix problems.

Note: If System and Security is not displayed you will need to change how you are viewing Control Panel. To change your view, click the down arrow in View by and select Category. View by is located in the top right corner of the Control Panel.

On the left navigation pane, click Change settings.

Set Computer Maintenance to Off.

Reference to those step: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/kb/978980

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Or you can set this registry key : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\Maintenance | MaintenanceDisabled (DWORD) := 1

Answer 9

There is a way turn off completely automatic maintenance. Delete from Task scheduler and that's it. No more maintenance. When I'm only disabled, after restart system maintenance start again, but if I delete it`s not working anymore.