Computer wakes from sleep automatically every night

For the past few months I found my computer awake in the morning even though I had put it to sleep when finished working on it the previous day. Running Powercfg /lastwake revealed Update Orchestrator as the task that woke the computer. However that is not a problem!

While the many solutions presented in this forum and across the internet focus on preventing Orchestrator from waking the computer, I don't see that as a problem that needs fixing.

Orchestrator and other tasks such as backups need to run periodically. Doing so at night is preferred so as not to interfere with daytime work. The Orchestrator task on my system was showing a last run time of 11:41 PM each day. I also have a backup that runs at 2:00 AM once per week. My assumption was that both of these tasks would wake the computer, do their job and then the computer would go back to sleep per the power settings. This was clearly not happening in recent months.

The real problem is the computer was not going back to sleep after the wake event.

Powercfg /lastwake only tells us what last woke the computer. It does not tell us what prevented it from sleep.  To determine that...

  Launch a command prompt with admin privileges.

  Run powercfg /requests

You'll see 6 categories. You want to have None under each. If you see an application listed, you may need to take some action in the app's settings or simply uninstall if it is not needed. 

In my case, MiniTool ShadowMaker was listed. I had previously installed that to try it out, but had no need to continue using it. I uninstalled it and ran powercfg /requeststo verify there are now no applications listed.

Since doing that, my computer is always in sleep mode when I check it in the morning. It still wakes up at night as it should for maintenance tasks and backups and then goes to sleep per the Power Plan. Which is what I want it to do.

Well, it's a nice suggestion. When I run powercfg/requests, I did get all "None" except

EXECUTION:

[SERVICE] \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Windows\System32\svchost.exe (UsoSvc)

Universal Orchestrator

Orchestrator. Go figure. (For effect, say "Orchestrator" like Seinfeld said "Newman".)

> Orchestrator and other tasks such as backups needto run periodically.

> Doing so at night is preferred so as not to interfere with daytime work.

1. Windows Update was introduced with Windows 98 and no version has ever had to wake up my laptop at 2 in the morning!
2. And it's not as if the update service is so heavyweight.
3. Again, why does usoft think they know better than me about when to do updates on my computer? Give me the option to specify when updates should occur!

Orchestrator. Go figure. (For effect, say "Orchestrator" like Seinfeld said "Newman".)

> Orchestrator and other tasks such as backups needto run periodically.

> Doing so at night is preferred so as not to interfere with daytime work.

1. Windows Update was introduced with Windows 98and no version has ever had to wake up my laptop at 2 in the morning! 
2. And it's not as if the update service is so heavyweight. 
3. Again, why does usoft think they know better than me about when to do updates on my computer? Give me the option to specify when updates should occur!

Fortunately I have Windows 10 Pro and can control update schedule via the local group policy editor. If you don't have Pro then I guess you're out of luck on that.

Anyway, your result indicates Orchestrator was running at the time you executed that powercfg command. Could be a coincidence that it happened to run at that time, but it should not be running continuously or for hours at a time. 

Run Powercfg again and see if it still listed. Also I recommend running this command:

powercfg /systemsleepdiagnostics

This will generate an HTML report C:\Windows\System32\system-sleep-diagnostics.html which includes a lot of info on power requests, sleep states changes, and sleep intervals. 

The Power requests sections will list what processes woke the system and for how long. It's color coded green/yellow/red. Select anything that is red and you will see the processes and how long each ran. 

As an example, the application that caused my problem;  MiniTool ShadowMaker had a service running for nearly 9 hours on my system. Nothing else listed in the report ran for more than 95 seconds. This report may give you some useful clues. It's worth a look.

It also may be worth running the Windows Troubleshooter for Windows Update.

This continues to happen with no response from Microsoft. Shame on you, Microsoft. This is wasting electricity on a wide scale and putting extra wear and tear on expensive hardware. It's bad enough that you force automatic updates without proper control over how and when to install them, but when you constantly force a PC to wake due to those updates (without actually installing updates the majority of the time), while preventing the user correcting this awful behavior, you're just adding insult to injury.

I've attempted some of the workarounds described around the web to fix this issue, but none have worked for me. There are others that I haven't tried due to how absurd they are, but no one should ever have to go to the extent described by many of the workarounds to fix behavior that should simply be common sense.

It is clear that Microsoft has no intention of addressing this since this issue continues to get comments from users without a response from Microsoft. It says a lot about a company that consistently does things like this but then refuses to address the actual issues. In fact, it makes you wonder if this behavior is actually intentional. You don't have to search for long to find the many issues that Microsoft has with their updates, so this now appears to be life as a Windows user. It is clear that users are no longer Microsoft's priority. Maybe they never were.

My apologies for the rant. I've grown very tired of this and other issues that Microsoft has no intention of acknowledging.