Windows 10 won't go to sleep after recent fall update

Many thanks, Xenexer. This is fascinating and instructive, but unfortunately - as you yourself have proven - it is the very versatility of the OS that is baffling me. One needs the time to unravel all of this complexity to fix whatever may be preventing 'Sleep' from doing what it could do if other users did not need their PC to be woken from sleep by something other than their own forefinger on the keyboard.

I don't have that time, I fear.  I want 'Sleep' to accomplish what it promises, on its face, when I click that option.

I can see why Microsoft would not want to develop an option called 'Sleep through Wake Timers or even Thermo Nuclear War' but that is what I feel I need at this stage.

Please no more advice, however erudite. I am content to be required to hit my PC with the 'Shut Down' mallet from now on.  I will look yearningly at the 'Sleep' option from time to time, sighing 'if only' - with much the same poignancy as all of those princes who tried to wake the Sleeping Beauty with nothing other than a sword to hack the brambles -

but then I will remember and adapt the last line of 'Some Like it Hot':  'no OS is perfect!'

The whole point of a wake timer is to save energy: it allows a computer to sleep when it normally wouldn't be able to, under the condition that it wake up periodically do whatever it needs to do.  Without wake timers, the same applications would require your computer to be on 24/7 in order to function.

If you don't need whatever program is using wake timers, uninstall it.  If you need that program, and then program needs wake timers, then you need wake timers.

If you're certain nothing on your computer should need wake timers, either you've chosen to install very poor-quality programs/hardware/drivers, or you have malware.

Just to be clear, every modern OS works this way--even your phone does something conceptually similar.  It allows devices to go into a low-power state that never would've been able to previously.  Of course, there are programs that abuse this, and there are a lot of poorly designed programs that use wake timers unintentionally or incorrectly.  Microsoft lets you do just about whatever you want with your computer; they leave you with the responsibility of choosing what's acceptable to install.

When I ran the powercfg /requests the following came up:

\Device\HarddiskVolume3\Users\ron00\AppData\Roaming\AGData\bin\AnonymizerLauncher.exe

\Device\HarddiskVolume3\Users\ron00\AppData\Roaming\AGData\bin\proxycheck.exe

Don't know what it means or if there  is anything I can do to mitigate it.

Ron

That's crapware/malware.  Uninstall AnonymizerGadget.

64 bit system - Chillblast - Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 

I thought I had already said that "ImHereTo Collect"'s solution does not work for me.  Seems not - but it doesn't, sorry.

If you Google this you find a considerable web literature. Windows insomnia is almost as legendary as Butch Cassidy. 

Constant updating of a complex OS seems to be a bit like wall-papering:  tamp down one bubble under the paper; another pops up somewhere else.