How to disable Perfwatson2.exe from Visual Studio 2019
- From the help menu, select Send Feedback > Settings.
- In the Visual Studio Experience Improvement Program dialog, select No, I would not like to participate.
See Visual Studio Customer Experience Improvement Program for the official Microsoft instructions.
This change writes to the registry. See then next answer for fixing directly in the registry.
You can do it via the registry. For a 64 bit OS, the key is at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM
And for a 32 bit OS, at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM
For Group Policy management (settings from IT department), it's
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\VisualStudio\SQM
The key name is OptIn (a DWORD), and you need to set it to 0 to disable.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/visual-studio-experience-improvement-program
To set it automatically
(On a 64 bit OS machine not managed by a group policy), fire up an admin command prompt and just
REG ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VSCommon\15.0\SQM /v OptIn /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
You may have to close and restart all visual studio related processes (or reboot) for the change to bite.