My computer is about a year old and is Windows XP. When I push the power button, it usually goes into standby within a couple seconds. Just the past week or so, I’ve noticed that it consistantly takes about 15 seconds(during which the computer is just normal, as if I’ve issued no command), then goes into standby.
Any idea why? Oh, it does the same if I order standby from the shutdown menu.
There are various levels of “Standby”. Deeper levels usually involve saving critical files to disk which can take 10 secs or more in most cases. Check how your machine is set to go into standby.
What else has changed in the past week? Install any new programs? Download anything suspicious? Change any settings?
Try the age old “run adaware/spybot, virus scan, and defrag” method and see if it gets better.
What’s running when you’re trying to put the computer in Standby? Is it using Standby, or is it actually Hibernating? If a lot of data is being stored in RAM at the time you attempt to Standby or Hibernate the computer, it’ll usually take longer to dump that data to disk before turning the power to RAM off and losing the crucial data.
Also, I do recommend a defragment, especially if you use Standby/Hibernate often and you have not done a defragment fairly recently, or if you have installed and uninstalled programs, or been downloading a lot.