This was strange occurrence. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 and every time it went to sleep, when I went to wake it up, the case fan would whirl up at full throttle and stay on, the screen would remain off and the computer would not acknowledge any key presses. The only option at this point was to do a hard shutdown by pressing the power button for a few seconds. A reboot at this point would work fine but once again if the machine went to sleep it would not waken properly. I reset the bios, tried a few other power options within windows to no avail. I then decided to see if it was a possible hardware conflict and well low and behold it was. unplugging the Logitech trackball I was using allowed the system to shutdown and awaken without issue. It appears this setup has some issues with incompatible peripherals. If you are having this issue, I suggest you remove any extra USB devices except for the bare keyboard and seeing if that solves your problem and then connecting them one by one until you find the offending device.
