I have a Dell Vostro 3550 laptop with Windows 7 installed. For whatever reason whenever I close the lid for a while and then open it up again, without EVER having shutdown, the laptop will not "turn on". I used to be able to just touch the on-off switch and it would "power up" again. Has a setting been inadvertently been change?? What steps must be taken to get it back to where once having lifted the lid up it will be where I left off??

THANKS,
PeterCheck the power OPTIONS in control panel to see what happens when the lid is closed (sleep, hibernation, nothing)HI Allan,
What should the correct setting be?
I switched from sleep to "Do Nothing" Is that a bad setting for the laptop? Would it be better set at "Hibernation"?

Thanks for your quick response,
PeterThere is no "right". Whatever works for you is fine. Personally, I'm not a fan of either hibernation or sleep.Thank you Allan!
You being the genius I will go with the "do nothing" option.

PeterAnother consideration might be that while the lid was closed, the battery died.I have seen this before, with Dell desktop models actually. It seems the sleep and hibernation settings shutdown all I/O interfaces in certain Dell models, making it quite literally impossible to "wake" the machine from hibernation. Something about the way Dell builds their hardware doesn't agree with the Windows Power Saving settings. Not sure what it is, but I do know this is not an isolated problem.