Well, hypothetically, let's say the OP has Vista Ultimate running with glass
enabled and his sidebar turned on, some sort of anti-virus, hasn't
turned-off any default services and nothing else running on his computer.
(This would qualify as a normal idle state for a typical user). Now,
admittedly, I have a little more RAM installed, but if I boot to Vista,
log-on and wait for indexing and whatnot to all catch up ( I gave it an
hour, this morning), I am using 614MB of RAM. The OP has 512MB of RAM
installed, in total. Add to that, the system the OP is writing about came
standard with integrated graphics with three additional graphics card
choices; the OP doesn't specify which graphics scenario he has, but if it is
integrated graphics, the system in question has even less system RAM
available. We'll assume the system does not have integrated graphics.. I
maintain that there simply is not enough RAM in the OP's system to run Vista
Ultimate. And surely, for a system to wake from a stasis state, turn on a
monitor, some peripherals and read data from a hard drive takes some RAM.
So, if the Sleep mode stores the system state in RAM, and, as I theorize,
most of the RAM is "filled" with this data at the time of wake-up, there
isn't enough system RAM available to both hold the system state and turn-on
the monitor.
Like I said earlier, just a theory, but I bet I'm more right than wrong.
Also, the only benefit I see to this new Sleep mode is notebook users who go
into Sleep, either have no A/C access or forget they haven't turned the
unit off, and then the battery drains down, so this would save the data.
Other than that, I see no use for it either.