Thought I might offer this, even though I don't understand it, in case
anyone else has a similar issue.

For over a year now, I have made it a practice to shut down my laptop (HP
Pavilion) to the "sleep" or standby mode. (Not the hibernation mode). It
shuts down the hard drive and video and puts the computer in a low energy
use.

But, whenever I have wanted to awaken it by hitting any key on the keyboard,
it has been very random in terms of how quickly it "wakes up". Sometimes
it will spring back to life almost immediately. More often it takes
anywhere from 15 seconds to over a minute before the display turns back on.
Once in a while it has taken so long that I had doubts it was ever going to
"wake up". I've tried to find a reason that is software related,
unsuccessfully. It's just random.

A couple of weeks ago I took some pictures with my camera and uploaded them
to the computer using a USB flash card reader.
When I was finished, I forgot to unplug the card reader and left it plugged
in.

I have discovered that with the card reader plugged in, the computer
responds immediately after hitting a key to awake from sleep mode. Not once
in the past two weeks has it been sluggish or random like it was for the
past year. Unplug the card reader and it goes back to it's old ways.

I am curious if the reason is due to loading the power supply a bit with the
USB card reader in, or is it a software issue related to the computer
re-recognizing the existence of the card reader as another drive.

Whatever the reason, it works. So, now I just leave it plugged in.

Eisboch