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Maintenance in Progress Windows 8 What Does it Mean ?

Posted byASHISH PANDEY

 

 

If you have used Windows 8 for some period of time, inevitably you will see this message “Maintenance in progress” showing up in the “Action Center”. You can click Open Action Center to view more detail and recent messages about your computer’s status but it doesn’t tell you exactly what’s doing behind the scene.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Open Action Center, under Maintenance tab, expand the tab you will see a section about “Automatic Maintenance”. All you see is the last run date (if it has successfully ran before) and the option for you to start or stop “maintenance”.

But that still doesn’t answer what exactly it’s doing when Windows 8 is running automatic maintenance. Well there is a quick way to find that out . While maintenance is running, you can go to the newly enhanced Task Manager to take a peak at what processors your machine is currently consuming most of the CPU or memory. This usually leads to a good indication at what the automatic maintenance is doing.

As you can see, there are couple processor or services it has fired up. It’s running the Antimalware Service Executable (Windows Defender Service) and Service Host: Disk Defragmenter (Optimize drives). You can further confirmation this theory by manually stop  running the automatic maintenance, shortly after you should see those services goes away from the top CPU or memory usage chart in the task manager.

How to Schedule Automatic Maintenance ?

Now that you know what “Maintenance in Progress” means in Windows 8, you can feel free to schedule when to run by clicking “Change maintenance settings”. By default it’s running everyday 3am, and you have the option to let the machine wake up to run the scheduled tasks if the machine is in sleep.

Conclusion

Windows 8 has enhanced some of the automatic tasks to keep your PC health and live up to it’s potential speed. Whenever you see maintenance in progress on your taskbar from the action center, it’s a good idea to leave it, if you feel the need to use your system’s resources else where then you can stop the task anytime.