Automatic Maintenance made its debut in Windows 8 and is available in Windows 10 as well. In this post, I will share how to perform automatic maintenance in Windows 10.
What does PC Maintenance mean in the broader term?
Disk Fragmentation, Running Anti Virus Scan, Cleaning up temporary files, running Windows Update Manually, security scans, etc. The name can be many, and we had been doing it all manually one after the other or using verity or third party tools.
Windows 8/ 10 brings in a new feature, Automatic Maintenance, which allows to run all these tasks in batch and perform it for you. The best part, it does not impact the user’s performance and honor rules.
How to perform Automatic Maintenance in Windows 10
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- Where to find Automatic Maintenance?
- What is exactly happening?
- How to schedule Automatic Maintenance
Where to find Automatic Maintenance?
Type Automatic Maintenance in the Windows Search bar, and it will give you the option to open Automatic Maintenance. Here you can choose the time to run the tasks daily at a fixed time. It can even wake up the computer from sleep.
What is exactly happening?
So now that I have told you where to find it let’s take a moment to understand what goes on into the heart of this incredible process. Automatic Maintenance combines all the background processes, including the third-party software and apps to include themselves in the process.
The best way to find out the details is first to run it and then launch the task manager. When you are on the task manager, switch to Processes tab and sort by CPU or Disk usage.
You will see that Windows 10 launches one by one all necessary tasks like Disk Defragmenter to Optimize Drives, Run the Antimalware Service executable, run the COM Surrogate Process, Scripted Diagnostics Native Host process, etc. In case any of the third-party apps have included themselves here, you should be able to view them too.
The best part of this system is that even if you do something on your computer, you will feel a minimum or no slowness on the laptop because of the design it follows. It happens in the case of the manual process. However, when you interrupt the pc during the automatic schedule, it will stop instantly and resume back after 2 minutes of idleness.
In case of critical updates, the user will be notified and asked to manually perform the process, if and only if the automatic task was interrupted too many times to get it done.
It also takes care when you are mobile, i.e., on Laptop Battery. The automatic maintenance is not triggered and can run when you switch to AC power.
How to schedule Automatic Maintenance
I am sure you must have figured out by now, but for the sake of reference, it is available at Control Panel\System and Security\Security and Maintenance\Automatic Maintenance. You can setup timing there.
Hi, thanks for your detailed Explanation on this subject… I’ve been using windows 8 since the preview was released and, I always asked myself what is actually hapening when maintenance is running… Again Thanks:-)
Thanks for this article. I just installed Windows 8 on my main computer and I’m tweaking my settings. I found this article very helpful.
Why the process in my Laptop takes many hours
How do I uninstall this? Infinity is too long for maintenance and it doesn’t seem to do any maintenance. Last virus scan was last year. It doesn’t do any of the things you say.
I am on satellite. Automatic maintenance uses satellite time and will not run if I am not on line.
Maintenance is no problem to do and can be done off line except for updates, Which can be downloaded between midnight and 5 am with no satellite charge. Need to be able to completely disable this procedure, or program set to only work from midnight to 5 am. This is a problem that must be resolved.
Runs continually and locks up my PC. Have disabled it many times and it just starts over after 20 minutes. Can’t set a specific time to run, it runs whenever it wants…. soooooo over it!