standby not standing by. sometimes...

Hi all. When i put my computer on standby when the screen goes black and it usually turns off sometimes the screen goes black but the fan keeps going and the power light is still on. this has happened about 6 - 7 times over the past couple of months. i have looked in the event viewer but there doesn't seem to be anything thats related. so i'm not sure what could be causing it.

when it does freeze the only way of turning it of is by pressing the power button. then when it starts up again it doesn't come back from off standby it boots up like it's been switched off. like not on hibernate or anything just off. i've checked SMART on my hard drive and ran memtest86+ but no error on either of them. anyone got any ideas? the computer's spec's:

HI-Grade 8615 GTK

intel celeron m cpu 420 1.60GHz
notebook mam2080 Motherboard
samsung 256MB RAM
FUJITSU MHV2040AH 40GB Hard Drive
VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro IGP intergrated 32MB Graphics Card
Realtek hd audio output Sound Card
Sony CRX850E CD-RW / DVD
OS's: windows xp sp3/ ubuntu 10.04

Standby problems are very hard to diagnose. They are usually software problems, though. Do you have any special applications running that may break standby?

there's the same programs running when it does freeze as when it doesn't. I don't have any programs running that i haven't had running before.

Does it do the same thing in Ubuntu and XP?

thats what happens with windows and in Ubuntu it goes on to standby fine but when you switch it back on it freezes on the login screen.

It is really starting to sound something hardware-ish. Any kernel messages when it freezes?

nope none that i can see. although it is a graphical login screen. I'll try to put it on standby from the command line to see if there are any messages there.

sorry for the delayed reply. i kept forgetting to try it. well i tried to go into recovery mode (single user mode) but the screen was like the screen was half off the left-hand side and the left side was on the right. if you know what i mean. so i logged in to xterm through the graphical login but when i typed in suspend and pressed enter it just sat there. that is how you suspend through the command line right? i am planning to reinstall ubuntu so once i do that i'll see if it does the same.

There are kernel logs you can check after the fact.

It is /var/log/kern.log . You might want to check out some other logs like udev/Xorg/gdm/etc...

ok so i had a look in the kernel log and there is some stuff to do with it going on standby but i don't understand any of it really so i don't know whether you could have a look at it?

http://www.mediafire.com/?kgi6i5u540tu2r3