1 How to Turn On or Off All Background Apps for the Current User via a REG file2 How to Enable or Disable Individual Background Apps in App Settings3 How to Allow or Stop Apps from Running in the Background via Power Settings4 How to Enable or Disable Background Apps for All Users via Local Group Policy Editor5 How to Turn off Background Apps in Windows 106 How to Kill a Specific Background Process
Should you stop background apps or disable them? There are various reasons to stop apps from running in the background, but a major one is the resources they use. Each background app naturally uses a portion of your system’s resources, albeit a tiny amount. Add the impact of lots of background apps together, however, and it could make a low-spec machine even more sluggish. In these cases, you may want to turn off background apps entirely. As well as hardware resources, background apps typically use internet resources. This isn’t an issue for most people, but if you have a very limited data plan, background apps could help you blow through that data cap. Of course, that data is also going somewhere – typically to a remote server owned by the supplier of the app. If the background data includes analytics, this might put your privacy at risk. So why keep background apps enabled? Mostly, it comes down to necessity. Some apps, such as an email or messaging client, need to send data in the background so they can check if there’s any new activity. We can say the same for an app that tracks your location, for example, such as a “find my device” app. But your calculator app? Video player? There’s little reason these apps need to access resources in the background other than to send telemetry data. These we can safely disable.
How to Turn On or Off All Background Apps for the Current User via a REG file
How to Enable or Disable Individual Background Apps in App Settings
How to Allow or Stop Apps from Running in the Background via Power Settings
How to Enable or Disable Background Apps for All Users via Local Group Policy Editor
How to Turn off Background Apps in Windows 10
If you’re still on Windows 10, you’ll notice that the process to stop apps from running in the background isn’t the same. If you’re struggling, you can check our dedicated Windows 10 tutorial on the matter instead.
To turn off background apps in Windows 11, double-click “Disable_Background-Apps_for_Current_User”.
This may be useful if you don’t want your users to turn off their activity and miss important emails or messages.
How to Kill a Specific Background Process
If it’s not a background app in general you’re having trouble with but rather one of its specific processes, you can kill it via a variety of methods. Just follow our guide on how to identify and kill any process.
