I noticed recently that every hour my Windows 10 PC was popping up a command prompt window and closing it very quickly. At first I thought I had some kind of malware installed but all the scans I ran said that I was seemingly okay. I then thought Windows Update might be the culprit but it too, seemed to be innocent.

I then went hunting in the Scheduled Tasks and lo and behold I found the bugger. Armed with this knowledge I took to Google to discover that this is apparently a common thing that is annoying a lot more people than me – especially if you run stuff in full screen mode like games or media players because the process seems to minimise those things when the task runs every hour.

Anyway, to get rid of it you can do so manually by clicking your Start button and typing Task Manager and running it.

Expend Task Scheduler Library, the expand Microsoft, then expand Office. Right click on OfficeBackgroundTaskHandlerRegistration and Disable it.

If you’re familiar with the command prompt, run it as an administrator and enter the following command: