Windows 8 ‘Maintenance in Progress’
April 25, 2012 5 Comments
One irritation with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is the System Maintenance process; this has two modes – inconvenient and bloody inconvenient. Once you get the “Maintenance in Progress” message, you can kiss goodbye to any productive use of the machine until it’s finished – whenever that is, you get no clue. If you notice the Action Center Icon, the clock indicates that Auto Maintenance is running.
This opaque process is uninteruptible and provides no clue as to what it is actually doing. I haven’t yet found a satisfactory way to turn this off. It effectively locks up my machine. Its not backing up the system, that much I do know.
You can find a short explanation in the Action Center under Maintenance, but no help on turning it off. All you can do is try to set the time when it kicks off. Just open the Action Center, click the arrow next to maintenance, and click change maintenance settings. You can effectively postpone it off from there. This will not work while maintenance is being performed.
Moreover it only offers a choice of time and wake up option.
You can disable it permanently by going through the Services.msc page, but as I’m still not au fait with all it does, the all-or-nothing option seems a little draconian. AJS
About Allan J. Smithie
Allan J. Smithie
open action center , under maintenance drop arrow you can stop a running scan and change settings. cannot disable from that screen. :(
I shall investigate, sounds like a useful option. As usual, not an obvious control to find! It’s almost as if Microsoft doesn’t trust the user to have control of their own machine. Oh. They don’t. Thanks Greg. AJS
Yes this sucks. I’m sitting here watching it now. I’ve tried to disable in CP and registry no luck. Its using g 100% disk. The other night I let it run and 5 hours later I came back and it still had my system tied up. My guess is it’s installing updates because if I shutdown restart and shutdown again the next time I boot it gives me option to sleep, shutdown or update and restart. I like it but i think ill stick with Win 7 Ultimate. I don’t have a touchscreen monitor which 8 is just not worth having without it in my opinion.
Since installing Windows 8.1 my PC runs the ‘Maintenance in progress’ permanently. It’s schedule to start at 0200 in the morning, but even if I manually stop it/reboot/whatever, within 20 minutes it’s back up again – irritating.
Neil: 8.1… ahh. Hm. Yes. Quite. It’s one of those Microsoft fractions that causes as many issues as it solves. What can I offer besides tea and sympathy? AJS