The apps in Windows 10 are very useful for many things and you can download many of them free-of-cost from Microsoft ‘s App Store. But some of these apps keep running in the background once they are launched even after closing the app window. Fortunately Windows offers an option for you to turn off any of these apps from staying in the background once they have been closed. This option is available through the Settings app in Windows 10, but as we have been – it does not work in the latest version of Windows 10 Build 1803 and therefore an alternative method must be used.
Here is how you can disable the Windows apps from running in the background using some Windows registry edits:
- Open Windows Registry Editor by pressing Win+R, entering regedit.exe and pressing Enter.
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\BackgroundAccessApplication.
- Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named GlobalUserDisabled and change its value to 1.
- Similarly, create another DWORD (32-bit) value named Migrated and change its value to 4.
- Close Windows Registry Editor.
From this point on, all the background apps will be prohibited from being run in your individual user account in your Windows 10 PC. However, if you wan to disable background apps from being run for all the users, then you will have to depend on the Group Policy editor in the following manner:
- Open Local Group Policy Editor by entering gpedit.msc in the Run dialog (Win+R).
- Select Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → App Privacy.
- Find the setting named Let Windows apps run in the background, double-click on it and change its value to Enabled followed by Force Deny.
- Click on OK to save the settings and close all the open Group Policy Editor windows.
Using these two effective methods, you can easily disable Windows Apps from running in the background. There are other ways but all of them either change the registry values mentioned in this article or they depend on the local policies.