While there are numerous third-party computer maintenance and optimization tools, Windows 10 has a set of built-in ones. In fact, it’s designed to perform various maintenance tasks whn your PC is turned on but you’re not using it.
The Computer Maintenance task includes several operations for PC optimization and cleanup such as fixing the system time and broken shortcuts, removing unused Desktop shortcuts and so on.
In most cases, users are not bothered by these automated tasks but if you’re not happy with the system performing changes to your settings and shortcuts, you can easily disable automatic computer maintenance in Windows 10.
Before we get to the instructions, here’s what Windows 10’s Automatic Computer Maintenance task actually does:
- Removes desktop icons that haven’t been used over the past 3 months
- Removes broken shortcuts from the Start menu and the Desktop if there are more than 4. Typically, these shortcuts point to applications that don’t exist anymore.
- Check and syncs the system clock with a time server.
- Removes error and troubleshooting history reports older than 1 month.
- Checks hard disks for file system errors.
How to disable automatic computer maintenance in Windows 10
As I already mentioned, this feature won’t bother most users, but if for whatever reason you want to disable it, that’s definitely possible. Keep reading to find out how!
Disable automatic computer maintenance via the Registry
To disable automatic computer maintenance in Windows 10, the first thing you need to do is open the Registry Editor. To do this, hit the Windows key + R shortcut and type regedit in the Run dialog then press Enter on your keyboard.
With the Registry Editor open, navigate to the key below:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ScheduledDiagnostics
Tip: If your PC is running Windows 10 Fall Creators Update you can just copy and paste the path in the Registry Editor address bar and hit Enter to jump straight to it.
If you don’t have the ScheduledDiagnostics key, you will need to manually create it.
In the right pane you should have a key named EnabledExecution. If you don’t have it, just create a new DWORD 32-bit value and name it EnabledExecution. Double-click the key to edit it and set its value to 0 (the default is 1). This will disable automatic computer maintenance in Windows 10.
Disable automatic computer maintenance via the Control Panel
If you’re a more visual person, here’s an alternative method that disables automatic computer maintenance but relies on the Control Panel.
Press the Start button, type “control panel” then click on the desktop app result to open the Control Panel. In Control Panel’s search box, type “troubleshooting” as shown in the image above. Click on the result called Troubleshooting, which is also the only one.
On the Troubleshooting screen, click on the link called “Change settings”.
On the following screen, select the “Off” option under the Computer Maintenance section then click the OK button. Just like when using the registry tweak, this will disable the automatic computer maintenance Windows 10 normally performs.
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