Welcome to the Grok Shop! If you look at
your task manager in Windows 10, you
might find some apps running that you
didn't start up yourself. For example,
here I'm showing the your phone.exe app
which I've never used and definitely did
not start myself. So what's going on
right? In Windows 10, Microsoft introduced
Universal Windows Platform apps. These
apps have a special ability to run in
the background.
They can also be suspended, but even when
they're suspended they can still be
doing things as shown here in
Microsoft's own article. So in the
interest of security and conserving
resourcesr, I highly recommend disabling
all background apps that you don't need.
Quite a few of these apps shipped with
Windows already enabled. Today I'm going
to show how you can disable these. By
disabling these apps it makes it so the
apps can't run unless we start the apps
ourselves. So in order to play along, you
need to have Windows 10 build 10134 as
a minimum. To check your build, just do a
[Win+S] and type "system", go to system
information and there at the top at the
end of the version string you'll find
your build number. So let's get started
by going to "Start"; next click the little
gear for settings; next we're going to
click in the area with the lock icon
that says "Privacy."
OK, now in the left column we'll scroll
down to find "Background apps" and click
that.
So yeah, in this area you have the
ability to control individual apps. If
you happen to have some apps that you
want to be able to do stuff in the
background, you'll have to turn every
other app off except the ones that you
want. In my case I don't want any of
these apps to be able to run in the
background so I'm gonna use the slider
at the top which disables them all. And
again, what these sliders do: it disables
the ability of these apps to be able to
do stuff in the background; so by turning
them off, the app still exists and you
can still use them; they just can't do
stuff in the background. But if, for
example, you use the alarm clock and you
turn everything off, your alarm clock
might stop working. So be sure you go
through and make sure there's nothing
that you actually need. OK, when you're
all done there you might find some apps
are still running in the background. If
you do, go ahead and do a reboot now. Once
you're back up, you should find most of
those backgrounded apps are gone. However
Microsoft still has a few that are super
sticky and I'll be covering these in a
future video, as far as how to get rid of
those too. Now if you're running an
edition of Windows other than the Home
Edition you can also achieve the same
result using the Group Policy Editor.
We'll start by doing a [Win+R] to open
up the run dialog and typing gpedit.msc.
OK next we're gonna open
"Aadministrative templates" and then
"Windows Components" and finally "App
Privacy". OK the setting we want to adjust
is called "Let Windows apps run in the
background". So we'll double click that.
OK next we want to change the radio
button from "Not Configured" to "Enabled".
OK here you can set a default for all
apps. I'm seting mine to "force deny"
for everything. You can set it to "force
allow" or you can set up black lists and
white lists in these fields below here
or you can cede control to the user for
certain apps. You just need to figure out
what the app names are for the apps you
want to do that for and put those in the
fields here once you're all done there
we want to go ahead and reboot now.
OK when you come back up everything
should look "mo betta". Everything should
be cleaner, you shouldn't have as many
background apps running. You might still
find some background apps running; as I
mentioned earlier there's a few that
have been anointed by Microsoft and
they're particularly sticky I'll be
addressing those in future videos though.
For some additional tips and techniques
on dealing with these background apps be
sure to check out my associated blog
post. So that's it for this video. I hope
you found it helpful. If you did, thumbs
me up or give me a comment. Be sure to
stay tuned for more Windows 10
optimization and privacy clampdown
videos. But as far as giving Windows 10
background apps the boot goes,
That's how it's done.
Thanks for Watching.
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