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Problem

I've found on several occasions that I've gone to use my computer only to find that it's practically unusable; just about everything runs extremely slowly.

Symptoms

  • The action center flag in the notification area showed that maintenance was being performed ("Maintenance in Progress") or a scheduled scan was running ("Scheduled Scan").
  • The computer's HDD activity light was constantly on, indicating that the bottleneck could be the HDD activity.
  • Opening Task Manager showed that "System" was using the HDD a lot (~20MB/s).
  • Looking at the maintenance tasks in Task Scheduler shows that either "Idle Maintenance" or "Maintenance Configurator" (or both) triggered the maintenance.

What I've tried unsuccessfully

  • Telling Windows to stop maintenance/scan. The problem still persists until I wait a long time for it to finish what it's doing.
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Sam
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  • The type of behavior you describe indicates a hardware problem. The Automatic Maintenance should not cause your system to be unable to do anything else. – Ramhound Aug 21 '14 at 11:04
  • @Ramhound, in my experience, it's normal for Windows to be almost unusable if a process hogs a key resource such as the HDD or CPU, so I doubt it's a hardware problem. I suspect the issue is that when Windows goes back into a user-not-idle state, the maintenance task doesn't stop or just takes way too long to stop. – Sam Aug 21 '14 at 11:10
  • When Automatic Maintenance is ran on any of my machines I use what you describe does not happen. I guarantee you my laptop is a several factors slower then your computer. – Ramhound Aug 21 '14 at 11:29
  • Fairly normal, in my experience. Best thing is to schedule the maintenance for 3AM. – Daniel R Hicks Aug 21 '14 at 11:31
  • @DanielRHicks, I've already got it scheduled for something like that. The disruptive maintenance I'm describing occurs during waking hours. I think it's the "User is idle" type of maintenance. – Sam Aug 21 '14 at 11:40
  • It does RAM checks, compiles .Net files into native code and removes files from WinSxS. disable it when you don't want this: http://superuser.com/a/502049/174557 – magicandre1981 Aug 21 '14 at 16:14

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