Is my computer not going to sleep properly?

Okay so when I try to put my laptop to sleep, on my old laptop what would happen would be the computer would quickly shut-off for all intents and purposes. Then the power light would fade in and out, letting you know it was in sleep mode. It took very little power. And you had to hit the power button to wake it up. The laptop itself though didn't have the fan running and was cool, quiet, and seemed like it was off. then it'd wake up quickly etc. like it's supposed to

My current laptop though when i choose for it to go to sleep, the screen quickly goes dark, but the power light never goes off or does that "fade in/out" effect. Both were/are Gateway computers, so I'd think they'd do the same thing. On top of that, the laptop fan will continue to run, and the underside will be mildly warm like the computer was never even shut off. It basically seems when i put it in sleep now, it just shuts off the display, and logs me out on the computer. So if i wiggle the mouse, the moniter comes right back on at the login screen immediately.

Is this right? I preferred how it was before where the computer almost seemed off and didn't run the fan and was cool and quiet etc. Is it some power setting I have it on or some other setting? I keep the laptop on "balanced" normally. Thoughts? Or is that what "sleep" normally is w/ just the display being off, and the computer logging the user out, but otherwise remaining completely powered on almost?

 

bumped for answer lol. Am I just nuts?

 

No, that makes sense. Sleep mode (Standby in this description) should be just powering the memory (to keep the state of the machine from being lost), with everything else, like your old laptop. Slightly different power light behavior is a minor enough difference, but the fan should be off and the underside should cool off (except possibly right under where the memory modules are). I'm not sure why the fan would be running when it was supposedly in Sleep - it should be off in both Standby and Hibernate, which are the two possible meanings of Sleep in Vista.

You may want to try using the MCE Standby Tool and seeing if that helps - tell it to use the S3 Sleep mode (or S4 Hibernate if you come to prefer that later). This program was designed for helping with standby/hibernate problems in XP Media Center Edition, but works with all recent versions of Windows, and as we all know, both XP and Vista are far from perfect in standby/hibernate.

It's also possible that Gateway designed it this way on purpose for some reason, but I find that quite unlikely - more likely it just doesn't work right. Which wouldn't be unusual - my last two computers before this one never did do standby/hibernate quite right.