Automatic Maintenance starts too early while PC idle.

I don't know a good title to tell you the problem I am having, but I will explain it in full detail with a few pictures and you will have to take my word on this.

One of the pictures shows the properties of the task scheduler of what conditions I set Idle Maintenance to trigger at. As you can see, I set it so that the laptop has to be idle for 15 minutes before the task is supposed to start.

I let my laptop stay on and sit idle at 8:00PM central time.

The other picture shows when Automatic Maintenance started. 8:04PM central time. That is totally not 15 minutes of idle time.

I also let my laptop run this automatic maintenance by purposely leaving my laptop idle, and it is still running 3 hours later. Should it even take this long?

What is going on here? It's like I change some settings in task scheduler, and the outcome doesn't change at all. Automatic Maintenance always starts 4 minutes after the laptop starts being idle. No matter what settings I change, same result. I even restarted the laptop once, and no change.

I don't know about you, but I don't consider an idle PC as being one that doesn't have any input from the user. PC's could be burning DVD's, watching movies, or even running a trivia game without any user input just to listen to the game show host talk.

It would be interesting to see what you have under the other tabs in the scheduled task.

edit--- Is this what you used ?---

No, it is under task scheduler, where it shows idle maintenance, regular maintenance, manual maintenance, and maintenance configurator.

The culprit that runs 4 minutes after the computer is supposed to be idle is idle mainenance, which I set it to run 15 minutes after the computer is supposed to be idle.

In the screenshot, it shows manual maintenance as running because I manually started the maintenance process, but that was 4 hours ago.



I do want to know some facts about automatic maintenance though. If I miss a weeks worth of scheduled automatic maintenance, does 7 days worth of automatic maintenance stack up? So let's say that automatic maintenance usually takes 1 hour to perform, and I miss the scheduled maintenance for 7 days because my laptop was either hibernating or off for a week. Does it mean that the next time automatic maintenance happens, it would happen for 7 hours? If this is true, I think that is kind of dumb, if you know what I mean. It's like cleaning a house, and the next day, you clean the house again, when the house is already relatively clean.

I seriously don't know why automatic maintenance takes so long other than it is trying to run multiple days worth of automatic maintenance.

I checked task manager, and it says that antimalware service executable is taking at least 3 to 10% of the CPU, and it is the one that is using most of the CPU compared to other processes. I wonder why it is so important that it has to run daily, and why it takes forever to finish scanning?

I see.---

Like this---



I'll play with it.

Have you tried the other one ?

The maintanence must have an .exe file in system32 or somewhere to link to as an Action.?
If so Google might provide its' location.

I made a video.
It might be worth watching---

[video=youtube;6Fah5drwuy0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6Fah5drwuy0[/video]

I changed the user from SYSTEM to me in the video.
To run with highest privileges too.

Others here can help better than I to answer your questions.

How do you tell if it is running or not ?
Read the log file ?
It should say if it RAN though.
Yes it does. I just looked at it.
I'll let my computer idle & see if it runs like it should.

The one you mentioned has nothing to do with this. I checked, and the last time it run was several hours ago, and the task that runs 4 minutes after being idle is the idle maintenance task, as I check the time it started running relative to the time when the laptop started being idle.

I figured out what automatic mainenance is doing. I checked task manager and saw that Antimalware Service Executable is taking up most of the CPU, around 10 to 20% worth of CPU. I checked windows defender, and it says a scan has been run at 12:08AM, and that is the exact time that I started the automatic maintenance manually. The windows defender scan is finished, but Antimalware service executable is still running. Shouldn't Antimalware service executable stop after windows defender finishes scanning.