Windows 10: Stop computer waking: WaaSMedicSvc resets updateorchestrator tasks

Every morning when I would get up I would find my computer had been woken and then gone back to sleep. Using powercfg -waketimers I found that backup scan and policy install tasks were configured to wake the PC. On occasion, reboot would also be enabled. using psexec I was able to disable the tasks, only to find a day later that they had been re-enabled. I then managed to remove the wake computer (by editing the tasks xml file), only to find a day later it had been set back to true after setting it to false. I then deleted the tasks files, but a day later they were recreated. No matter what I tried, M$ was determined to wake my computer in the wee hours of every morning. During my investigations I found that WaasMedicSvc was the culprit "healing" the changes I had made. There are 10 PCs. Some don't wake up, others do. They are all on the same patch level. Each PC gets its updates from a WSUS server that I run. It's on Win 2012 R2 (Only because WSUS on Server 2019 is severely bugged). If WaaSMedicSvc is required for updating to work properly, how can I stop it resetting tasks every time I disable them so when I shut down the PC(s) at night they stay shutdown? A minor issue - All PCs are on 1809 LTSC. The Policy Install task exists on only one PC, yet all PCs were installed and configured using the same image and scripts.

:)

 

windows task wakes up computer

Yes, I'll quote you on that link again since out of all the options to disable wake timers, this is the only definitive solution to this problem. Especially the part where you remove all ownership and write permissions from Windows to the actual task file,
otherwise Windows will very aggressively guard this task and ignore/undo all your wake timer settings, in whatever way you did them.
Again, this is why it's so baffling to me that they can't say why this task is SO important that it needs to wake up your PC no matter what.

But at least having this solution more propagated will hopefully save some people the frustrating trial and error this has been for us.

After 2 weeks of tranquillity the PC woke up again this night and I think the previous night. There was some "update" yesterday. But I checked the scheduled tasks and the rempl tasks are still disabled, they didn't fire according to the scheduler, and the
wake up option is not activated.

An UpdateOrchestrator task (Reboot) has the wake up option but it is disabled as well. However it was also started the night before (but the update failed). So I will remove the ownership like I did for the rempl task and we will see. I am not sure because
apparently this task was not fired this night.

 

Can't stop machine waking itself from hibernation


My desktop machine keeps waking itself up from hibernation, usually during the night, despite my having taken all reasonable steps to stop it. I have:

• disabled waking on network, mouse and RTC in BIOS setup
• disabled wake on mouse and network in device manager (and checked with powercfg -devicequery wake_armed)
• disabled "allow wake timers" for all power plans

It doesn't however wake itself up from S5 (shutdown). I also tried leaving it in S3 sleep for over 24 hours and it didn't wake up, although that's not long enough to be certain that it never would.

Unfortunately my records in Event Viewer only go back a bit over a week to my upgrade to Windows 10, but I did notice a pattern in the first few days of waking at around 00:17 or 00:18 in the morning. Event Viewer suggested that this was due to mcupdate_scheduler, which was scheduled to run at 00:19, so I changed the trigger (following some instructions from Microsoft), but the next night the machine woke earlier, at 23:45. Unfortunately event viewer had no idea what caused that particular event. And today I have just run powercfg -waketimer and apparently there is a task \blah\blah\updateorchestrator\reboot which requires waking the machine just after 02:00 tomorrow morning. Clearly trying to change each individual trigger is a hopeless game of whack-a-mole which will sooner or later result in my wrecking something. How on earth can I stop my machine waking up?

 

TASK\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator wakes computer

The Update Orchestrator service is scheduled to run periodically. You'll find its schedule in the Task Scheduler. But I think that UpdateOrchestrator is responsible for pushing updates to your pc, so you probably won't be able to totally disable it (nor should you want to).

In the Task Scheduler, navigate to Task Scheduler Library\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator.

See if you can modify its schedule. (I've never tried it.)