Problems with sleep mode in Kubuntu

I have a HP Pavillian Laptop. Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2 GHz. 4 GB RAM.

I've installed Kubuntu on my laptop. The biggest problem is that my laptop doesn't go into sleep mode. The screen goes off, but the system is still running. I mean you can hear the fan and everything. The sleep in Windows Vista is quite convenient. I just press a button, close the lid and I can later resume from where I left it. While in the sleep mode, the laptop appears to be "off". There's just one small light that keeps blinking.

I've tried the hibernate in Kubuntu. But that isn't satisfactory either. First of all, it takes forever to come out of the hibernate state. Secondly, it doesn't preserve the application state. For example, if I'm watching 45 minute flash video on google video. I have the entire video buffered. After watching half the video, I need to step out for a little while. I do the hibernate. After coming back, I can't resume watching from where I left it. I have to reload the video. This doesn't happen in the Vista sleep mode.

What is the solution to this? Is there a different distro I can use to fix this problem? Will switching to a Gnome distro help?

For standby you may have hardware that won't go into sleep mode with linux drivers.

Flash support in linux is not so well and that is maybe why flash restart on hibernate. Maybe different browser/flash plugin can help. However time of html5 is coming so maybe you can wait.