Disabiling Built-In or System Level Scheduled Tasks in Windows 8 and Server 2012
If you've ever tried to disable a system level scheduled task in Windows 8 or Server 2012 using task scheduler, such as GWXUX or Automatic Maintenance, you may have seen the annoying prompt, "The user account you are operating under does not have permission to disable this task.". And it's even more upsetting when you get this prompt after you've located Task Scheduler and right-clicked "Run as administrator".
And wala! We've successfully disabled all of those annoying GWX system level and default scheduled tasks.
Luckily the System Internals tool PsExec is here to help us run commands as System! We simply need to find the full path of the registry key item, which Task Scheduler gladly shows us. We can use the following commands, all in a CMD prompt run as administrator in the same directory as PsExec.exe, to disable all six above scheduled tasks (and two more for the rest of GWX):
