How to Disable Automatic Maintenance in Windows 8

A few days after installing Windows 8, I was enjoying a movie on my PC when suddenly the movie started to stop sporadically. I also noticed a sudden spike in the hard disk and CPU usage. After nearly twenty minutes of hair pulling and watching Task Manager closely, I figured it out – it was Automatic Maintenance service of Windows 8. The Automatic Maintenance in Windows 8 takes care of automatic updates, automatic disk defragmentation, antivirus updates and antivirus scans and so on. Although it keeps your system fine tuned and up-to-date, sometimes it drives you up the wall. You can safely disable this Automatic Maintenance in Windows 8, if you want to.

Here is how you can disable Automatic Maintenance in Windows 8:

  1. Press the hotkey Win + R to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type taskschd.msc and press Enter. This will open the Task Scheduler window.Disable Automatic Maintenance
  2. In the Task Scheduler window, select Task Scheduler Library → Microsoft → Windows → TaskScheduler from the left side.
  3. You would notice many maintenance tasks scheduled in this category. Right-click on the task named Idle Maintenance and select Disable from the right-click menu to disable this task.Disable Automatic Maintenance
  4. Similarly, disable another task named Regular Maintenance by right-clicking on it and choosing Disable from the menu.
  5. After you have disabled these two tasks, the Automatic Maintenance feature is disabled in your Windows 8 PC. Later if you want, you can re-enable Automatic Maintenance by enabling these tasks.