Certificate Services Client scheduled task

[unifex]

I am not sure where to post this, so I put this into the general section.

I was trying to learn about the Certificate Services Client scheduled tasks today and basically I failed. With lots of information available on various Microsoft sites, the basic questions are apparently very hard to answer.

The question is - what are these tasks doing on a stand-alone machine? I mean, I have a PC at home which is not part of a domain, active directory is disabled as far as I know, no windows networking either (the "network", i.e. my dsl connection, is treated as a "public network"). The Windows credential manager shows zero credentials stored on the machine.

Yet, there are scheduled tasks active and running every time I log onto the machine with the description:

"Certificate Services Client automatically manages digital identities such as Certificates, Keys and Credentials for the users and the machine, enabling enrollment, roaming and other services."

It does not preclude me from doing anything on the computer, but it clearly uses a lot of disk read/write operations. If I am on the HDD, this is fairly noisy. On SSD I am worried about the unnecessary writes.

So, the question is - do I actually need these tasks or they are safe to disable? What exactly is being "managed" by these tasks if there are no credentials at all on the machine?

 

[logicearth]

SSL, aka., HTTPS uses certificates along with those various services involving certificates. Digital Signatures (which Windows uses extensively) also make use of certificates and the various services provided by the service.

So yes, you need it.

 

[unifex]

Thanks Logicearth!

Strange that I could not figure this out from all the Microsoft information. Their sites are full of info about how to configure credentials for active directory and roaming profiles and what not. But I do not use any of these. That's why I got a bit confused.

Still, do you know what these tasks actually do?