Are apps soaking up your battery or hogging your RAM? Fortunately, getting rid of resource-hungry background apps is easy in Windows 11.
Background apps in Windows continue to perform actions such as updates and fetch up-to-date data even when you are not using them. While Windows can intelligently manage and power optimize background apps, it can still drain your battery and increase data usage.
Fortunately, Windows lets you change the background permission for individual Microsoft Store apps. Here we show you how to disable individual or all background apps in Windows 11.
If you want to disable individual Microsoft Store apps from running in the background, you can disable it from the Settings page. Follow the below steps to disable background apps from Settings.
If you want to disable apps based on the battery usage statics, you do it from the Power & battery settings page.
Related: How to Extend Laptop Battery Life With Custom Windows Power Plans
The Power & battery page in Windows 11 Settings provides data on the battery usage of installed apps. This is really useful If you want to disable background apps based on battery usage to save some juice.
Here's how to do it.
If you want, you can disable background apps for the individual user. Useful if you share your PC with multiple users at work or home. For this, you will need to create a registry file and run it with administrative privilege.
To disable background apps for the current user:
If you want to disable background apps for all the user accounts, you can manually create and modify the registry values in the Registry Editor. Before you proceed, create a restore point. You can use the restore point to restore your PC to its current state if something goes wrong when editing the registry entries.
To disable background apps for all the user accounts:
Alternatively, you can also use the Group Policy Editor to configure background apps settings on your computer network. This is useful for system administrators having to configure multiple systems.
Note that Group Policy Editor is officially only available on Pro, Education, and Enterprise editions of the Windows OS. If you are on Home, read our detailed guide on how to enable Group Policy Editor in Windows Home. This involves a registry hack to enable the missing functionality in the Home edition of the OS.
Once you have the policy editor up and running, continue with the steps below.
To disable background apps using Group Policy Editor:
Windows allows you to configure background app permission for the Microsoft Store apps. You can disable these apps to conserve battery and avoid unnecessary data usage on a metered connection.
That said, if you are struggling with slow system performance issues, disabling background apps may not be the solution. What you can do instead is reconfigure your OS, analyze your storage devices and look for hardware upgrades to boost system performance.
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Tashreef is a developer and works as a technical writer at MakeUseOf. With a bachelor’s degree in Computer Applications, he has over 5 years of experience and covers Microsoft Windows and everything around it. When not looking for a missing semicolon or churning out text, you can find him trying FPS titles or looking for new animated shows and movies.
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