waking up vista from sleep mode

[Chroelle]

Ok, the worst thing about this question is the big chunk of pride I loose by asking this.

I am usually the guy with all the tech savy with computers, but I was never that into laptops before I got one last fall. So far it has given me little fun but lots of trouble.
Here is my issue.

The laptop has Vista installed and yesterday accidentally when going to shut it down, Tanja set it on sleep-mode instead of power off-mode.
Now the computer ran out of juice, and I have been recharging it all night, only to find that when you start it up, it starts off where you shut if off - in sleep mode. We never used sleep mode on it before, and now we cant get it to get out of sleep mode, and as I can't just restart it without it ending up the same place I am in search for some keycombination that wakes up Vista. All the info I can find on the web is about how I set Vista to going into sleepmode.
Please help!
Remember that even the answer you might feel is obvious is not obvious to me as I never owned a laptop before.

[Tank]

Did you try switching in on via the powerbutton?

[Chroelle]

Yep. That was one of the solutions I tried. I also tried CTRL-ALT-DEL, but with no luck either....
Thanks for trusting me when I said that I was a noob when it came to this.

[Tank]

I have a notebook too. I use some sorts of sleep mode (there are two in Vista). One can be woken up by moving the mouse or pressing a key, and the other by pressing the power button.

[Railwaymodeler]

Toshiba laptop, perchance?

With some of the Toshiba P3 systems I have been working with, they had a similar issue that a BIOS update fixes, where they don't come out of sleep mode properly.

Look at your laptop manufacturer's website and see if there is a fix they provide, either BIOS update, or Windows based, that addresses such an issue.

[Chroelle]

The problem of course is how to implement changes?