Well, just yesterday I got a new Dell Inspiron 1525 with Vista pre-installed, and it is already driving me crazy! At first everything seemed all right, until I closed the lid, and walked away from the computer for a moment. When I came back, all the stuff I had on-screen was gone, and in its place were the start up programs. I momentarily figured out that closing the lid initiated the sleep function... however, that's not the problem. The problem is that the sleep function didn't, and doesn't, work! It automatically restarts the comp upon initiation, and brings you to a screen which proclaims "Windows was not properly shut down" and the options to enter safe mode or regular mode (it automatically chooses regular after about 30 seconds).

What's worse, while trying to address this issue with various "cures" sprawled throughout the web, I came to a screen which stated the computer couldn't detect the hard disk after another failed sleep attempt. Pressing the power button got me out of that, but now (after also running some system diagnostics by pressing f12 at the boot screen), shut down and hibernate also fail to work. Both automatically restart the computer as soon as it turns off. Needless to say, sleep still doesn't work either.

Does anybody know what the problem is, or what I should do? Is it possible that the computer has been damaged in all of this? And if so, is it only the hard drive that is the issue, or are other components at risk as well?

Hi, I was also having this problem, without the 'fail to find hard drive' problem tho, and I found that you can disable the sleep function in Vista, you can go to this site: How to enable AMD Cool'n'Quiet or Intel SpeedStep in Windows Vista | Windows Vista for Beginners

follow those steps, and well what I did was that I choose never at the part that says 'Turn off the display' and at 'Put the computer to sleep', thats going to make the computer NOT go to sleep and turn off the display, but at least you wont have to restart like that anymore. I read that the problem was that Vista had that as a new feature to save energy but something went wrong and there was supposed to be a fix for this but I dont know. Hope this worked at least temporally.

I've already turned off the sleep option, which is all right for now (I want it to work in the future though). However, I really could use the hibernate setting, and it doesn't seem a good sign that even the shut down option doesn't work. I would feel a lot better if somebody could give an explanation for all this, and if possible, a fix.