Dell laptop in eternal sleep

For those who don't know, I just got a new totally wicked Dell Laptop Inspiron 1420. It's totally awesome because it has a Intel Duo Core 2 with 2.2 ghz, 4mb cache, and 800 FSB. And coupled with 4GB of ram. This is one beast. Yeah I am nerd...shut up.

Anyways, I ran into this seriously most frustrating bug or maybe it's a technical hardware problem. Who knows, but the problem is my Dell laptop will go into Sleep mode, no surprise there, after awhile of inactivity. The thing is once it enters "sleep" mode I can't bring the laptop display back! I should make a note that this sleep mode really isn't sleep mode...allow me to explain.

To get an idea of what was exactly going on (I am using Windows Vista by the way, which really isn't that bad...I guess all the talk about how it really sucked got me all scared, but to honest, I kinda like it), I went to the power management options and set my laptop to go into sleep mode after 1 minute. So waited one minute, and the laptop went into sleep mode. And when I say sleep mode what actually happened:

1. The display went black


2. The front 5 lights all turned off


3. The only light doing anything was the power light which was blinking

This should technically be the sleep mode. And so, I just pressed the power button and volia the laptop display came back and all the lights (well just the ones needed become solid again) and everything was fine and dandy.

So I am crazy right? What am I talking about? Now I waited one more minute so the laptop would go into sleep mode and I could really convince myself I was going crazy. Except this time after one minute, the display disappeared, but the lights remained solid. No power light blinking...nothing just like it was normally operating..only the display was black...Okay....?? Pressed power nothing...press the enter button nothing...press the media control buttons (ie. play, stop, etc) and the lights came on, and then disappeared. So it appeared my laptop was still running just the display is not visible. So I called Dell technical support hoping I could get some answers and after some lengthly describing of the problem, the guy suggested that run music and let the computer go into sleep mode. This will confirm that the problem is not the computer going into sleep mode, but rather the display or video card driver has a bug or whatever.

So I restarted my computer (doing the manual hold power button down for 10 secs...not good for the computer) and yeah yeah, got back into windows vista. And then I opened itunes and started playing a song and waited...and waited...and waiting...the laptop wasn't going into sleep mode!!! So I stopped the music and then waited 1 minute and sure enough, the laptop went into sleep mode! This was so weird...so according to this...the laptop will not going into sleep mode if music is playing on your lapotop??? But this was the actually friendly sleep mode. So I was able to turn it back on and then I waited another minute and the laptop went into the "unfriendly sleep mode." The funny thing was I left my mouse cursor on the play button of itunes before it actually went into the "unfriendly sleep mode" and so even though the display was gone, when I left-clicked (note: I didn't move my mouse after the display disappeared) the music started again! And I could stop and start it anything. So this proved that the laptop was still running only that the display was gone. So to summarize this:

1. Appears that the dell laptop goes into "friendly sleep mode" the first time and you can get out of the it by pressing the power button once


2. The second time, however, results in an "unfriendly sleep mode" which there is no way to get out of. In fact, I wouldn't even call it sleep mode. It's more like display just goes away, everything still works, but you can't get the display to come back. Not really a sleep mode.


3. Having music running will cause the laptop to NOT go into sleep mode. I found this to be most interesting of them all.

So how I do I solve this? The honest answer, I HAVE NO IDEA. I am still waiting for the Dell support guy to call me back and help me. But he suggested that we should try upgraded our video card driver (which I already think is upgraded, but we'll see what happens). And as a last resort, I can just set the power settings to NEVER go into sleep mode which would solve everything. But this would pretty stupid, and not to mention energy sucker. Come on, I am want to be environmental...

Crap like this makes me hate computers.