Well, between midnight and 1:00 AM I was online in one of those HP Chats. I ended up making everything NEVER, and also went to the command prompt and used the following command, powercfg -h off, which turns off the hibernate functionality.

Before this, I put the latest BIOS update back in. I also updated to the latest chip set, and updated a couple other drivers as well.

I can now leave my laptop alone and come back to it a while later without it having powered down. Still, I think something has changed in the laptop, because I could also bring it back out of hibernate by moving the mouse or hitting any key. Not so now, which is why everything is set to never and I won't allow it to go to sleep; this means it will consume more power. So much for these companies trying to go green.

If I am fortunate to buy another laptop someday, it won't be an HP; it will be either ASUS or Toshiba, based on the reliability doc that Craig Berntson wrote about.

I appreciate your explanations, Al.

Cecil