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.
