That's not quite accurate: I can shut down my machine, it just doesn't stay shut down.

It used to be that I would not shut down my laptop at the end of the day and would just put it to sleep, I began to notice that it was waking up overnight. Not just once in awhile, but every single night. I would watch it go to sleep and it would still be asleep when I went to bed an hour or two later, but every morning it would be awake and running and I would occasionally wake up overnight as I heard it reboot.

I've recently abandoned putting it to sleep in favor of a complete shutdown. Same results. I watch the laptop shut itself down, it appears off when I go to bed but sometime between my going to sleep and waking up the computer is restarting itself.

Sometimes it'll be warm to the touch if I don't leave it plugged into a cooling pad despite no programs being up and running.

It's a Dell Inspiron, nearing two years of age. It's been suggested that I reboot, go to set-up and see if there's an automatic wake up setting. I haven't been able to find that.

Any idea what could cause this? Is it doing any damage to the computer? An easy fix?

Many thanks for any helpful suggestions that you might have.