How to stop background apps in Windows 11 (the setting everyone links to does not work)

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Search for this and you will get the same nine steps every time: Settings → Apps → Installed apps → the three dots → Advanced options → Background apps permissions → Never.

That setting is real. It is also almost certainly not going to help you, because it does not apply to the applications eating your CPU.

The setting only governs one kind of app

Windows has two kinds of application, and they are managed by completely separate machinery.

Packaged apps — the ones from the Microsoft Store, plus the built-in Mail, Photos, Xbox and Weather — run inside a container. Windows brokers what they are allowed to do, which is why it can offer a per-app "let this app run in the background" switch at all. Those are the apps in that Settings list.

Desktop apps — Chrome, Steam, Discord, Slack, Spotify, Adobe, Teams for work, your antivirus, every .exe you downloaded from a website — are ordinary Win32 processes. Windows does not broker them. There is no permission to revoke, and they do not appear in that list.

Now look at Task Manager and ask which category the processes near the top belong to. In practice, on almost every machine, the answer is the second one.

This is the disconnect. The guide tells you to turn off Weather and Xbox Game Bar. Meanwhile Chrome is holding eleven processes, Steam is running a web helper, Discord is at 3% forever, and none of them were ever affected by the switch you flipped.

Why Windows 11 made this more confusing

Windows 10 had a single page — Settings → Privacy → Background apps — with a master toggle at the top. It was easy to find and it felt comprehensive.

Windows 11 removed that page. The control still exists, but it is now buried per-app under Installed apps → Advanced options, and there is no global switch. So a great deal of writing about this describes a page that is not there any more, and readers conclude they are looking in the wrong place.

They are not. The page is gone, and even when it existed it only ever covered packaged apps.

What actually controls desktop apps

Each one, individually, in its own settings. There is no central Windows control for this, and pretending otherwise is why the standard advice fails.

The ones worth checking first, roughly in order of how much they cost:

• Chrome and Edge. Settings → System → "Continue running background apps when the browser is closed". This one is genuinely surprising to people: closing every window does not necessarily end the browser. Check the tray.
• Steam. Settings → Interface → do not run at startup. The client keeps a web helper process alive whenever it runs.
• Discord. Settings → Windows Settings → turn off Open Discord and Minimize to Tray. Closing the window minimises rather than exits, by default.
• Spotify. Settings → Startup and window behaviour → Close button should close, not minimise.
• Teams and Slack. Both default to starting with Windows and staying resident. Both have a setting for it.
• Adobe Creative Cloud. Runs a background service plus a node process. Required only if you use Adobe Fonts.
• OEM software — SupportAssist, Vantage, Armoury Crate. These are usually services, so see below.

The two places nobody looks

If an application restarts itself after you have disabled it everywhere obvious, it is in one of these.

Services (services.msc). Anything set to Automatic starts before you log in and is not in any startup list. Set it to Manual rather than Disabled — Manual lets it start if something genuinely asks for it, which is a much safer failure mode.

Scheduled tasks (taskschd.msc). This is where updaters moved after too many people disabled their Run key entries. Google, Adobe and most OEM vendors keep tasks here that fire on a timer, on logon, or on idle. Look under Task Scheduler Library and its vendor subfolders.

Sysinternals Autoruns shows every one of these locations at once, which is faster than checking four tools by hand. Tick Options → Hide Windows Entries first.

Be honest about what you gain

Turning off background apps is worth doing, but the promised outcome is usually oversold.

Closing a resident app that is idling at 0.3% CPU does not make anything faster. What you get back is memory, some disk activity, and — on a laptop — real battery life, because an app that wakes every thirty seconds prevents the CPU from settling into its low-power states.

The case where it genuinely matters is different: not idle background apps, but background apps that are actually busy while you are trying to do something demanding. A sync client indexing 40,000 files while you render, an antivirus scan starting mid-game, a browser with a runaway tab during a build. That is contention, and it is the thing people are really describing when they say the machine "feels slow".

If that is your situation, what is at 100% CPU is a more useful question than which apps are allowed to run.

The order to do this in

1. Task Manager → Startup apps. Stop things launching at all. Which entries are safe is its own question.
2. The tray. Whatever is down there right now is resident. Each icon is an app with its own setting.
3. Each app's own settings, using the list above.
4. Services and scheduled tasks, for anything that keeps coming back.
5. The Settings page everyone links to, last. It covers Store apps, which are rarely the problem.

That is backwards from every other guide on this subject, and it is the order that reflects where the load actually is.

What we are building

Everything above is a permanent decision: this app may run, that one may not. That works when an app is pure overhead, and works badly when it is something you need — just not right now, not while you are doing this.

AppFreeze takes the other approach. Nothing gets disabled. It notices which application you are working in, eases everything else down a scheduling priority for as long as you are busy, and restores every one of them the moment you close it. Your sync client still syncs and your chat still chats; they just stop competing with the render.

It is in development. If that is the shape of your problem, the newsletter is the way to hear when it ships.