Configuring what happens for "sleep"?

I am coming off a 3 1/2 week experience where I wound up replacing my MB and processor (both with exact replacements, as shown in my system specs), and my memory.

In the "old" configuration, when my computer "slept" it REALLY slept. Power light off, drives off, fan off, no evidence of life. And I'd have to press the power button to wake it.

Since the replacements (necessitated by my original Gigabyte MB going bad, and taking the original processor, and its warranty replacement processor, with it), the "sleepiest" the computer gets is flashing the case lights but leaving the fans and presumably disks running. And jiggling the mouse "wakes" the computer.

This is likely a bios setting, as nothing with my Windows installation changed - and I checked, and the settings remain turn the display off after 20 minutes, and go to sleep after three hours.

So two questions:

• For a gigabyte board, what BIOS setting(s) get me to REALLY go to sleep, and need the power button to wake up?
• Is the above bullet what I really want? In terms of prolonging disk and system life, is it better to be "always on" or better to go to full "sleep" for a period of 12-18 hours? My typical computer usage is to restart Windows at bedtime, then not touch the computer again for 18 hours until I return home from work.

Most BIOs have sleep options so check you MB manual as there are different levels of sleep/hibernate and how to set them up. Also make sure that the Nic is disabled from waking the system as any netwrok activity could keep the pc awake.

It sounds like your BIOS is set to S1 sleep rather than S3.
S3 will shut it down completely except for RAM and +5Vsb (to allow key board to wake it).