I have one of the newer Vaio VPCSAs. When it comes to wake up for sleeping the machine gets stuck in the off state. I end up having to pop out the battery (which requires removing screws) to get a hard reset.

For now I've setup the machine to go into hibernate rather than sleep. Anyone have this problem or know a fix?

Tried updating via Windows Update (with the additional Microsoft update enabled)?

All of the drivers are installed. In fact, I had to install drivers to get the brightness\backlight control to work.

I have exactly the same problem and I have downloaded all updates from Microsoft. On another drive of the same computer I run windows 7 pro x64 and I don’t have any problem to wake my computer from sleep.
I have the x64 version of windows 8.

See if the BIOS lets you set the sleep state to S3. While there, make sure that the keyboard is set for awake from sleep (if that option is there). In windows, go into advanced power settings and turn stuff off like hibernate. Finally, go into device manager and make sure that the keyboard power management has "allow to wake the computer"

I have solved the problem and for what I understood it had to do with the fact that I was logging to windows with my hotmail account. Somehow the passwords + usernames from my local account and from my windows live account were mixed and the computer could not login resulting to a black screen.
I am almost 100% sure that this was the case.

Thanks for your replies.