Action on waking from sleep

When I first installed Windows 8 my system used to go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity and then resume on pressing any key. Recently, without any apparent changes to settings, it will not resume and the power button has to be actioned requiring a loggin. Can anyone tell me what setting controls all of this. I also am confused by difference between sleep and hibernate!

Mervyn said:

Can anyone tell me what setting controls all of this. I also am confused by difference between sleep and hibernate!

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Choose Never & it will stay on.
You might have to restart after choosing different settings.
Hope this helps.

See picture-

Control Panel / on left is a link 'Choose what the power buttons do.
From there you should see require a password or not setting for when it wakes from sleep.

Some keyboard drivers have a Power Management tab on its driver properties window .. in the Device Manager, to allow the keyboard to wake or not from sleep mode.

Sleep = stored in regular memory mostly, so it uses a tiny amount of power to hold the memory active. Wakes nearly instantly to where you were. Mine I think wakes faster than the key press can come back up.
Hibernate = stored on the hard drive. So when you wake, it takes you back to exactly how you were, but takes a bit of time. Hard disks are slow to spin up and grab all the info and write it to memory and paint the display.