Update on Dell Laptop External Sleep Problem

So I did some more testing, and I found out my theory about the laptop going into "unfriendly sleep mode" only happens the second time was false. I can't produce a reliable pattern, it just seems to sometimes go into a sleep mode, and then sometimes the display just turns off yet everything is still functionally.

I spent almost 3 hours on the phone with Dell technical support in hopes they could help me. Trying to explain to them the phenomenon of the laptop going into this mysterious "sleep" mode and avoiding it when music is playing was longest part. Over and over again I had to explain to them my situation. In any case, nothing worked. The technician even tried to flash my BIOS, and the scariest part was I was supposed to wait for my laptop to shut down and this would flash it...but it never shut down. When I told the technician I think he was worried out of his mind that he was screwed up my laptop. Flashing your bios is something dangerous and can really screw things up. So I had to manually turn my laptop off...for like the 500th time. And it booted up fine (whew), but when I tried to shut down it THEN tried to flash my bios only it failed with this message about how it couldn't update because it couldn't find the ROM file???

God...the technician then said he would go to bring this to Microsoft because it was clearly a Vista operating system problem. I don't know what is going on anymore. All I fricking want is for my laptop to go into this nice like energy saving mode when I don't use it for awhile. Back in the XP days, I think my laptop always went into this standby mode which was nice and all I had to do was press the power button once and everything came back. But after reading this article
it appears that Microsoft has replaced this with their new feature "sleep" (the same bloody feature I am pulling my hair out about).

Apparently sleep is a combination of standby and hibernate. The computer will go into standby for the first while, and then after awhile it goes into hibernate. Sounds good. Except it DOESN'T WORK.

I hate computers!!!