But there was only one problem with the laptop. It wouldn't wake up from sleep or hibernate properly. I have to force power off the machine and boot it up again after sleep. I tried everything. Updating the BIOS. Updating the drivers. Nothing worked. It was frustrating.
After a tedious round of elimination testing, the culprit was finally tracked down to a HDD caddy that I purchased from DealExtreme. This is one of those gadgets that lets you install another harddisk into your space-scarce laptop by using the slot reserved for the optical drive. I use it to add a 120GB SSD drive into the laptop and use it to run certain I/O intensive applications (eg. virtual machines).
As luck would have it, I chanced upon a discussion in NotebookReview.com that talks about this issue on another laptop (but also involves a HDD caddy). I am not particularly knowledgeable about the hardware details, but apparently one of the pins (diagnostic SATA pin) is wrongly connected to ground and needs to be disconnected.
I am not very good with the soldering iron, and anyway the pads are spaced too closely together for my meager soldering skill. So armed with a small tweezer and a sewing needle, I set about trying to destroy the pin in question. Thankfully the pin itself is rather thin, so it didn't take long. A couple of minutes later, I had a clean break.
I put everything back together and powered on the laptop. Taking in a deep breath, I click on "Sleep". Hurray! The red LED on the laptop started to pulse, which indicates it is sleeping. Pressing the power button brought the laptop back to life, just as it was intended to. I couldn't be happier! Thanks to the wonderful folks who shared this piece of knowledge!
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