Man, if they ever get standby/hibernate bug free and consistently working, laptop users all over the world would rejoice.
I've had the same problems for years, with Win95 all the way through Win2k. With Win2k, seems to depend on the latest updates applied from windows update, either for the OS itself or for Internet Explorer. My laptop went probably 6 months unable to automatically go into standby (Win2k / IE 5.5), and when I updated to IE6 it magically started to hibernate and standby exactly as my power settings specified. But, before that (Win2k IE 5.0), it had worked like a charm, too. Never could figure out exactly what the deal was.
Right now, it seems to be working... I'll keep my fingers crossed.
However, some things I've found helpful to eliminate as culprits:
First, install the latest BIOS update for your laptop from Toshiba.
Don't automatically assume a video, audio, modem or mouse/touchpad device driver listed on WindowsUpdate will work better than the latest OEM version available from Toshiba. Touchpad and video drivers seem to be the most unpredictable. If you do update your video driver to the latest and greatest, make sure you download and install any updated versions of DirectX too.
Installing the latest version of IE actually seemed to correct the issue most recently for me, but I had noticed that my computer wouldn't standby only after I had used IE or Outlook Express. If I simply booted up and didn't run either of these, it would standby fine. I could run Office programs, app development tools, hex editors, just about anything; as long as I didn't open the browser, or view an HTML e-mail in OE, it would go to sleep no problem.
At one point, my choice of screen saver seemed to matter. If I chose 3D Pipes, it seemed to use enough resources to keep my machine awake. At the current time, it doesn't seem to matter.
At one point, it seemed that having Outlook Express check for updated mail every 10 minutes would keep the system awake (my standby time was set to something like 45 minutes). This, too, no longer seems to be a problem with Outlook Express 6.
Also, if you have indexing service installed and running, a master merge seems to keep your computer awake, regardless of the performance options you configure for response time and resource usage. There are some registry tweaks you can apply to change the behaviors of indexing service, such as when a master merge will be started (doesn't always have to be at the stroke of midnight, it turns out), and how soon after system startup it should start checking for idle time... MSDN Library has all of this stuff documented.
Finally, seems to me I read that in some newer OS (either XP or ME or maybe CE, I don't remember), you can configure the threshold %CPU utilization that should be used to determine if the machine is "active". It might make sense to upgrade if you're running some background utility or poorly written shareware that consistently uses 2% of your CPU, and if it is determined by you that this "must have" utility is the culprit.
Best of luck,
BG3
